The Horror

Chapter two

"Sticks and sounds"

Ragazza E. Destino: She lay cold and unconscious on a flexible layer of twigs, something that shouldn't have been soft enough to break Ragazza's fall, but broken laws of physics yet discovered was working in her favor. She floated down like a feather until the sky broke beneath her. When she wakes, it's still about six o' clock.

I woke up to a row of trees sticking out around my peripheral like spikes, face angled towards the sky like I was experiencing the world from the grounds point of view. It looked like one giant photograph dunked under water and held to drip on a fishing line and clips, streaky and unintelligible. Sluggishly, I lifted my back from the ground, feeling lightheaded when I wrestled my volumed hair from the branch's spindley grasp, the ends being mud-caked and helplessly knotted. Truthfully, I was a little more than disappointed, cheated out of a broken bone, a scratch on my body. Such a task it must be, the chances, for a girl of my weight and height, just perfect enough to survive unharmed from the massive fall I just took. I look up into the nothingness of the sky, icy clouds descending like fog four stories off the ground, and no sign whatsoever of a cliff or opening. Nothing about it made sense, I could've sworn I'd fallen, hit the dirt with my arched back and a breeze carrying me into darkness of the mind, yet feeling nothing but the aching weights in my chest from the impact, and not from the plummet. It's a grim thought, but guess if I planned to die, I should've gone to "Point Despair" instead, although that idea nestled itself deep in my heart. A sudden chill runs up my spine and travels to the tip of my nose, following the split to the pads of my fingers, almost like a flame traveling up a waxy wick or a spark zooming through a conductive wire. I gaze down at my hands, not knowing what to expect, but I'd found out... I couldn't even see them! Or anything else.... Wha-WHAT the HECK just happened?!? Everything around me, even the rows of trees splayed every which way, was blurred and smeared like a filthy, oily camera lens, a monochromatic, monocultural, evenly flattened landscape. I fluttered my eyelids, hoping they would act like window wipers for my sight, and perhaps this daydream, but to no avail.

"What is this...?" I mumble to the soft stillness of the frozen air, noticing empty tears falling from my damaged eyes in pitiful attempts to clear my vision. It was no use, my eyes were basically melted at this point, hopefully temporarily. What gave me a bit of confidence towards the near future was the sharpening outline of my black leather boot. Well, now almost grey leather boots seeing as the light must've grilled them to ashes, because that was the only explanation I had. It was comforting to at least pretend I had some answers in a pool of phenomena. It made a rather cool effect, looking at it optimistically, like spines of a porcupine. What really made the pattern ominous on the other hand, was that fact that it was even there, that what happened wasn't some nightmare, but was a disturbing, surrealistic present. At a glance, it would seem this situation, this setting at the moment, would prove nothing out of the normal, but when you consider the eerily flat surface, the tree's similarities (almost as if they were duplicates), aspects started to claim abnormality. Perhaps I was shot with a tranquilizer or something, and was dragged to a random forest behind Sunset Peak. Maybe that would explain the light nearly blinding me. But why did it feel like I was actually falling? What did it mean? Hallucination? In truth, I neither wanted to believe that theory or any other besides the one where I was still vividly dreaming on the point of sunset peak.

My hands scrunched the ground below me, seeing details I couldn't. Below me was a melting snow puddle that felt like an old ICEE spilled on a two inch layer of twigs, and finally slathered with mud. The biome seemed slightly cooler than a temperate pine forest, and suddenly the unprecedented cool wind softly blew on my sun-licked face and whipped my dull brown hair. I rubbed the mud stuck in between my fingers, and huddled there in the sludge of snow, pondering what could've happened for something like this to happen. Naturally, I was drawing a blank because only someone like Einstein would understand what's up in this situation. Then whilst querying my anomalous situation, I realized my backpack didn't fall with me. If someone did this, why did they take off my backpack? I'm sure they didn't find anything valuable, seeing as I'm to broke to have anything of value on hand.