Children Of The Crucible

Tommy Part 2

Author's Note

Hey everyone, wanted to wish you all a very safe and happy new year!

Tommy's PoV

It was still dark outside when I woke up. I checked my clock and realised it was only half past four in the morning. That was weird in itself- I never woke up early.

Evenly weirder though, were my hands. One was stretched over my head, touching the metal headboard of my bed and the other was hanging off the bed touching the metal legs posts.

I tried to roll over to the other side of the bed but found that I couldn't. My hands were stuck, as though they had been super glued on to the metal. Trying to pull them away was like trying to pull two magnets away from each other. I yanked ever harder at them, working myself into a panic. Wrenching them free, I held them in front of my face and tried to study them in the dull light coming through the curtains. I had the most terrible night vision ever, and faced the dark room I thought hysterically that maybe I should have taken my mum's advice and started eating carrots to improve my sight. I let out a breath, forcing myself to think logically. It was probably a myth, something your parents tell you to get you to do something. Like how they tell you if you watch too much tv you get square eyes. If that happened in real life, it would have happened to me.

I reached out and flicked on the lamp sitting on my bedside table. It casted a dim glow over the room, making it look almost eerie. I looked at my hands in the new light. They looked perfectly normal. The only difference was that they tingled slightly, and felt slightly cold seeing as they have been sitting on metal for half the night.

I turned the lamp off and lay down. Then I felt it. My hand was being pulled towards the metal of my bed, as if by some inexplicable force. They moved across my bedsheets like they had a life of their own. I did my best to stop them, using all my strength to pull them back but it was to no avail. I went flying forward and my hands made contact with the metal.

It didn't matter how much I pulled against the mysterious force of attraction, my hands simply wouldn't budge from the bed. I imagined this is how a coin would feel when you hold a magnet above it. Wait, maybe my hands were somehow magnets? That would explain everything. Why my hands were attracted to by bed frame. They were only attracted to metal.

I yanked and yanked and eventually they came unstuck. If my theory was correct then my hands were now very strong magnets. I got up and walked across my room to my desk where I had a tin of pencils and some loose change sitting out.

As I approached I saw the coins gradually start to move towards me. They flipped over a few times as I got closer and then suddenly flew into my hands. It truly was amazing.

A thought struck me. If both of my hands had now mysteriously turned to magnets, how on Earth was I going to pry these coins from my palm? If I used my other hand surely they would just switch to that one?

I turned around and to get a pencil out of the tin to pry them off. Big mistake, the tin was attracted to my hand as well. So now I was stuck. There was no way I could use my feet, either. I was not that dexterous. And I was now conscious of how much noise I was making - the pencils were rattling about in their tin and the coins kept clicking against each other.

It was then I began to take in the absurdity of my situation now that I was properly awake. My hands were physically behaving as magnets and I was standing in the middle if my room with random items attached to me. I couldn't go to school like this; I'd get stuck to the door handles and would probably take out someone's eye with a fork flying towards me.

I wondered if this was all just a dream. I mean, it was definitely the sort of thing I would dream about. But I knew deep down that it wasn't.

My hands were beginning to ache under the weight of the objects stuck to them. I wished I could control the strength of my 'magnet hands'. I closed my eyes and willed the magnet to turn itself off and let the objects fall to the ground.

CRASH.

I snapped my eyes back open and surveyed the scene. My hands were free, the tin had a big dent in it and pencils littered my floor. I stared at my hands in awe.

I bent down to pick them up and thankfully they didn't stick. I placed them back on my table and willed the 'magnet' to turn itself back on again and that's exactly what it did. It took a few tries to get the hang of it, but I realised that not only could I turn it off and on, but I could control its strength.

Satisfied, yet extremely confused with my experiment, I went back to bed and lay awake, waiting for morning, thinking about what had happened to me.