Upside Down

(23) Don't Go Into The Woods Today

Chapter 23

Outside : Bad :: Inside : Good

Oh god, I'm just going to die. Right now, just fall down and die. I couldn't take it anymore! My heart felt like it was going to be ripped out of my chest and my brain was going to splatter against the wall soon. My hands were jittery and my eyes going everywhere and nowhere at the same time. If anyone took a good look at me they would have thought I was on crack or something and I could see that a few people were looking at me just like that. My right leg hasn't stopped moving since I walked in and my fingers continuously tapped against the top of the plastic in front of me.

Everyone was moving so agonizingly slow, I felt like I was going to burst out of my skin. All the noise sounded faded except the sluggish tick ticking of the clock on the wall to my right. Mrs. Wilsburn move through the desk at a crawling speed. The words on the paper in front of me seemed to be in a totally different language and I couldn't decipher them at all especially when they swirled around the page like that, up and down then practically floating off the page.

"Emerson!" I turned to look at the fat old woman in the weird long denim shirt that went to her ankles and the ugly flower print shirt that my grandmother would die to have ... if she wasn't dead already. Her words were slow and slurred and I tried to concentrate, I really did! But her voice wasn't making any sense and I couldn't help but look at the clock everyone in a while as it stagnantly tocked once .... Twice ... Trice ...

Ring! Ring! Ring, ring, ring!

Oh, thank god! Thank god, the lord and mercy heavens!

I jumped out of my chair and into the hall with glee. It was over and done with and I was so freaking happy. For a moment I thought I could do a cartwheel in glee but the hallway was too crowded and I didn't want to go to the Principal's office for kicking someone in the face. But thank god that class was over!

Now only seven more to go,

How was I going to survive today?

[At Emerson's House]

"Achoo!" Kriss winced every time Drew let out a painful sneeze upon the couch which he lay, "achoo, achoo, achoo! Ugh ... hey, Kriss?" Drew asked and Kriss tilted her head in question. "Can you put on a movie?"

"What?" Kriss asked, her eyes wide. She's heard of movies from the papers she read but she never really understood what they were. Some kind of ... entertainment she guessed but wasn't really sure. They sounded cool and you had to go to special places to watch them and sometimes they came out on things called DVDs but ... that's all she knew.

"Yeah, they're right under the TV on the shelf right there." Drew told her, pointing sickly at the stand holding the TV up. Kriss walked to them, looking around at the shelf where were they? "You're staring at them right now, on the shelf, they have words on them!"

Oh! Kriss saw them. At first she had thought they were a part of the shelf but they weren't. She pulled one out, a semi-flexible rectangular shaped box that was kind of thin with lots of bright colored pictures on it. It didn't look like much and she couldn't understand how it was entertainment. Maybe they looked at the pictures?

"Hey, that's Oliver And Co.!" Drew exclaimed. "I haven't seen that in forever! Put it in!" Kriss looked at him again, then back at the movie, then back at him with wide eyes. Drew sighed remembering she's never really seen stuff like this before. "Okay, open the case," Drew told her. Kriss looked around not knowing what the case was. "The case is in your hands, on the right side of it there is a kind of holey thingy and you pull the sides apart."

"Are you sure?" Kriss asked a bit afraid.

"Yep,"

Kriss looked on the right side of the case at the grove in the side and she put her small fingers on either side, pulling it apart. She yelped as it snapped open and showed a circular thing that showed the same pictures as the case.

"Good!" Drew praised. "Now put the CD in the movie player." Kriss looked at him with another blank stare. "The circular thing with pictures on it, you take it out and put it in the movie player. The movie player is underneath the TV. You press the black button that says 'Open' and place the CD in the slider that comes out. Then you press the button again then you press the button that says play."

Kriss nodded, determined as she snapped the CD out of the case then looked at the movie player that Drew was talking about. Soon after she followed his instructions the TV roared to life and Kriss nearly fell over with surprise.

"Come on, Kriss." Drew said, patting the seat beside him. "Come watch the movie with me."

With a smile on her face, Kriss leaped off the floor and to the couch just as the movie was starting.

[Seven And A Half Hours Later]

""Remember us." As simple an order as a king can give. "Remember why we died." For he did not wish tribute, nor song, nor monuments nor poems of war and valor, his wish was simple. "Remember us," he said to me. That was his hope, should any free soul come across that place, in all the countless centuries yet to be. May all our voices whisper to you from the ageless stones, "Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here by Spartan law, we lie.""

Kriss mouthed the words that Dilios said as if she remembered them by heart. She subconsciously lifted her hand to her mouth and chewed even though she had been out of popcorn for a long time. The Spartans raised their weapons and cheered as the camera zoomed out and showed the thousands of Spartans shouting with their sword and shields in the air.

Kriss (although she had already watched it twice before) cheered excitedly, throwing her empty popcorn bowl in the air, sending un-popped popcorn kernels in the air and all over the place. She jumped up and down, cheering along with the Spartans even as the credits started to roll.

Drew, snoring on the couch, didn't even stir in his deep slumber like a bear in hibernation.

With a giggle, Kriss plopped down on the loveseat, thinking about the movie she was going to put on next ... when she saw something flash in the wood, catching her silvery eyes in a glow. An unsettling feeling rushed through her as she kept her eyes away from the window. But her curiousity grew too much for her and just as soon as she turned her head to the window again she saw it.

Robotically, she stood and walked out of the living room to the kitchen then out the wooden back door. The forest stood before her as an uneasy feeling spread over her like jam on toast, the white and nearly bare white tree towered above with a range of leave colors from yellow to red to green with brown striping the wooden bark kind of like a jacked up candy cane. Snow came up to her ankles like a cold powdery puddle and Kriss held her elbows almost in a protective cover for herself as her eyes tried to detect any movement in the forest.

Slowly and cautiously, she stepped forward, leaving long dragging marks from her feet in the snow as she advanced towards the stripped trees. She could hear a few birds in the distance and the smell of a fox was nearby but the most shocking thing there Kriss found as she ventured deeper into the forest was the man who leaned against the bare white tree.

He was a grotesque looking man, taller than even Drew but with monster like features and a lot of facial hair. His dark eyes were piercing, his dark thin lips pulled up in his smirk and his wide nose looking like it had been flattened across his face with a frying pan but most of all he had teeth like a shark, a wide grin filled with sharp deteriorating teeth that had yellowed the color of piss. His chest seemed as wide as a house, covered in a white, dirtied, and ripped wife beater with his blue basketball shorts in no better condition.

"Kristina," The man let out in an animalistic drawl, "long time, and no see."