Author: Jude Curtis Greaves

I stared in disbelief at the fracture, in reality, contemplating its sudden appearance in my apartment. Hypnotized by the apparition, my muscles moved in the direction of the fortuitous scientific hypothesis while my consciousness told me it might not be a good idea to do so. However, my body was an unresponsive wreck and I found myself twenty feet in the air, above a large pond.

Like an osprey that suddenly lost its wings in the middle of a ferocious dive, I plummeted toward the ground. The force of my body hitting the murky pool knocked all of the air out of the interior of my now-bruised rib cage. For a few dazed seconds, I thought I was dead. Then the pain came back to my lagged nervous system in a ferocious forest fire of agony. In my suffering, I managed to surface and expel the water that had been previously trapped in my lungs.

Bruised and scraped, I trudged out of the muddy pool of water and surveyed my surroundings. I was in the middle of a grassy plain dotted with wildflowers and distorted with the occasional knoll. About a mile away, I perceived what looked to be a small town. Wandering over to this single sign of intellectual life, I realized that it wasn’t just a town, but the beginnings of a city.

Entering the outskirts, I discovered that I was in The same town that my dad had resided in over thirty years ago. Since my dad had recently passed away, I ran to where I thought the location of my father’s old home was, full of excitement. Strutting down the streets of the conurbation, I tripped on some badly-set pavement and crashed into the cement. Because of this, I hit a rather unassuming red skateboard and watched it woefully as it tumbled down the street. Quickly, I got up and tried to get away from the place as fast as possible hoping with all my might that the owner wasn’t nearby.

Continuing on my travels, I witnessed a red skateboard soar into the air and knock a primitive chachalaca out of the sky. “What in the name of…” my sentence was broken off by the sudden occurrence of the unfortunate bird landing on a jackhammer, activating the powerful device and sending it haywire. The jackhammer shredded the base of a telephone pole, cracking the aged wood and causing it to fall on top of a building.

The building collapsed in on itself as I realized in horror that the building was the same one that my dad lived in. As the realization of this event made contact with my brain’s processing unit, I Ran over to the foundations of the building and located the dying body of my dad. In despair, I climbed over to him. “Dad!?” I called out to him as he lay there paralyzed in his near-lifeless body. “I’m a dad?” A cracked voice answered in confusion as I witnessed my soon-to-be dad die. Again. Reality blacked out around me as my mind went into a turmoil of anguish.

I stared in disbelief at the fracture, in reality, contemplating its sudden appearance in my apartment. Hypnotized by the apparition, my muscles moved in the direction of the fortuitous scientific hypothesis while my consciousness told me it might not be a good idea to do so. However, my body was an unresponsive wreck and I found myself twenty feet in the air, above a large pond.