I sat up and looked around. It wasn’t the chemistry lab at school. I was sitting nestled in between two roots of a tree so large, I couldn’t see around it. Except it’s bark looked like it was as black as asphalt, I would think it’s a redwood. It was hard like asphalt too, too hard for a tree.
I slowly stood up, climbing up on the root and looking at the trees. All of them were massive, so huge my brain struggled to even comprehend them. Had I somehow been shrunk to the size of a mouse?
I heard someone yell and turned towards it. I saw three kids from my class running right towards me. I blinked when I saw what was behind them. If I was the size of a mouse, this was the cat. Only it was dark purple with dark green spots. Nothing like I’d ever seen even in pictures or nature documentaries.
I looked back between my roots. Under one of them was a hole. I yelled and waved my arms, “Over here! This way! Come on!”
I waited until I thought my panic would overwhelm me and dove for the hole. I had hoped it would be deep, but it wasn’t very deep at all. The three kids scrambled over the root and nearly fell on me as the crammed into the hole. There was a noise above us and a snout appeared with a bright pink nose.
I grabbed a stick and jabbed. There was a howl of pain and a moment of scrambling around the root, it tried from the other side and I stabbed again. There was another deafening howl and a snort in our direction.
The sound of the giant creature began to retreat. It was only when there had been silence for several seconds except the gasping breathing of my classmates before the adrenaline wore off in a rush. I sat down, hard, in the dirt. I looked at my three classmates and said, “What. The. Fuck.”
Timothy laughed weakly and said, “I didn’t know you knew that kind of language.”
“Knowing and choosing to use are different,” I replied dryly.
“What was that?” Denise asked.
“Where are we?” Loran asked almost at the same instant.
“No clue to either one,” I replied. “I woke up like… a minute ago?”
“Maybe five for me,” Loran said, “I found Denise nearby and then Tim came running at us, that thing behind him.”
“I didn’t… I stood up and it turned…. and saw me….” Tim was still gasping for breath.
Denise burst into tears and I started shaking harder, fighting the urge to join her. I put my face in my hands and took several deep breaths. I then said, “We need to find Mr. Tickturn.”
Our teacher was a smart man, and if anyone would know what was going on or what happened… I hoped it would be him. I sincerely hoped he would know. He had to know how to get home. It’s what I kept telling myself.
The four of us climbed out and immediately found three more classmates also standing on a massive root. We found another three trying to climb…. a bush? It wasn’t a tree, and the leaves were as large as cars to us. It had giant blue berries, but after a short discussion, we all agreed trying to eat anything when we saw a green and purple animal was probably stupid.
Henrich, a guy on the soccer team, eventually made it up into the bush-type-thing and said he could see a bunch of our classmates. We all treked in that direction to find most of our class with Mr. Tickturn staring at a…. car?
It was definitely the body of a car, but if you took a sedan and replaced the entire interior with a phone. Including an old-fashioned rotary dial sticking out the back window. There was no place for anyone to sit inside. There were legs instead of wheels, short, stubby legs and many metal toes splayed into the dirt.
Twelve kids were sitting on the ground and roots nearby. That meant we now had 22 out of our class of 24. Mr. Tickturn looked up from the car-thing and said, “Oh thank God! You’re all here now. We can go home.”
“Where are we?” Timothy demanded.
“I have no idea!” Mr. Tickturn said excitedly, “Another plane or planet or universe! I’ve got a lot of data, though not as much as I had hope for if the experiment had not prematurely launched.”
“What do you mean….” someone behind me started to ask.
We all stopped when suddenly there was a bright light. Another one of the car-but-not shaped things appeared about fifteen feet away and a woman stood on it’s roof. She was…. gorgeous. Like, out of an anime level of gorgeous and just as unrealistic in many ways. She had cotton-candy colored pink hair, which swept up from her face and then to where she had it in a pony tail, but that tail didn’t have individual strands, it acted as a single tail-shaped piece of hair down past her shoulder. She also stood taller than anyone else I’ve ever met in my life, like seven-feet tall.
“Derrell,” she spoke with an accent I thought sounded Russian, “what have you done? We were not supposed to go until tonight, you left without me.”
“Katya, I am so sorry,” he said, “It was an accident.”
“It was stupid,” she said firmly. “Now let’s get these kids home. You are lucky you left your lunch at home and I saw the lights from the car. It only took me a few minutes to figure out your coordinates.”
“Uhhh…. excuse me,” Madison spoke up,m her usually haughty voice quieter than normal, “Where are we?”
the giant woman looekd at them said, “You do not have the science to understand. He scarcely does. This is not your home and it is undoubtedly dangerous. We will get you home and you will never speak of this again.”
The last words were almost a growl, her voice deep and threatening. We all looked at one another and then nodded.
Light flashed and we all found ourselves back in our classroom. Except that a bunch of us were dirty, sweaty, and Denise had torn her blouse at some point – nothing was different. Except us.
Dream by Day 