Born between Worlds

The hallway is wrong…

It’s my hallway…the one with the crooked picture frame I keep meaning to fix and the cream carpet Mom would murder me for walking on in shoes. But it’s longer tonight. Every door I pass is shut and every door I pass is breathing.

At the end of it, something is waiting. It stands the way a person stands but only if the person was drawn by someone who’d heard people described and never actually met one. Too tall…Too still…Something is folded up behind its shoulders, rising past where its head should end and where a face should be there’s only a dark so deep it shines…like wet coal.

The air smells like burnt sugar and smoke.

I should run but I never do. In this dream my feet have never been mine. It lifts one long hand toward me… slowly, like I’m the one who might bite. The dark where its mouth should be…moves and it says one word... I never catch the word. Only the shape of it…hot and heavy on my tongue, like something I used to know.

I wake up at 3:07. Not 3:06, not 3:08. Four nights in a row now, sheets soaked, heart going like I’ve been running from something, and the first thing I do every single time is check my hands. I don’t know why. They’re always just hands. The thing about daylight is that it makes everything feel stupid for being scary. Which is probably why I’m staring at Mom’s jacaranda tree like it owes me answers. It doesn’t. It just sits there in the garden dropping purple flowers on the lawn like it has nothing to hide…then i slowly pass out a few minutes later until i wake again at 7am and prepare for the day.

What was that thing? Why won’t it leave me alone? What is it trying to tell me?

“Helloo... Hazel... HAZEL!”

I snap back so fast my neck cracks. Ashley is standing over me, one hand on her hip, the other waving in front of my face like I’m a TV that stopped working.

“Yes?” I say, staring at her with confusion written over my face.

“What’s wrong, babe? You’ve been staring at nature’s sweet nothing for like ten minutes…Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine Ash.”

“Mm-hm.” She doesn’t buy it. She never does.

Ashley has been in my life since kindergarten, from the day she walked up to me at nap time, saw that I wasn’t sleeping either and silently handed me half her biscuit. No speech no “let’s be friends” just biscuit. Eleven years later she still hands me half of everything. Her notebook, her fries, her bad days. She lives next door and our bedroom windows face each other. We take the same bus to the same school and sit at the same table, and somehow nobody has ever figured out how two people so different ended up in the same herd.

Ash is sunshine with a ponytail. She says sorry to furniture when she bumps into it she cries at adverts, she talks to everyone and everyone loves her for it. Me? I like quiet i like my room i like horror movies because I need something to remind me that my heart is still working. And I have a face that Ash calls resting bitch mode and I call accurate and still eleven years of biscuit means there’s a short list of people I’d actually go soft for and she’s at the top of it.

She sits next to me and for a second I think she’s going to let it go.

“Hazel it’s been four days… you zone out then you come back looking like someone walked over your grave. You’ve been doing it in class on the bus in the middle of my sentences...”

“I said I’m fine...” as i lie, my mind wandering off again as this strange figure clouds my mind again.

“Okay, uhm, hello? No.” She stands up, flicking her ponytail. “We are not doing this again. I’m going to get my phone from my house, I’ll be back in a few, and by the time I’m back you’d better have snapped out of it, because I’m not dealing with this any longer.”

She leaves her notebook on the table like a hostage and finds her way out. The front door clicks shut. The house goes quiet…

“What the fuck is going on with me?” I whisper to the empty room. I look down at my hands again. Just hands. A little warm…maybe.

Probably nothing.

Footsteps…Heels on tile getting louder as they approach the living room.

“Hello girls!”

That cheerful voice can only be Mom. She walks in the way she does everything like the room has been waiting for her. Cream blouse not a single crease, a shopping bag swinging from her wrist. Her shoes are off before she’s even fully through the door because shoes on the carpet is a crime in this house and she has never once let anyone forget it.

“I got popcorn,” she says. “Romantic movie night as promised!”

Ashley and Mom are the same species when it comes to romance. Give them two strangers, one rainstorm and a misunderstanding and they’ll cry for two hours. I find it boring and predictable though I want the monster behind the door! I want the music to drop! Love stories never make my heart jump and personally I’d rather be scared than sleepy…might be why i keep imagining stuff in my head lately…NAHHH

“So what have you girls been up to since I... Hazel where’s Ashley?”

She’s scanning the living room, and finding no sign of her.

“hey Mom. She went to her house to get her phone. She’ll be back in a bit.”

“Her phone huh...” Mom’s eyes rest on my face a second too long, like she’s checking something against a list in her head. Then it’s gone, and she smiles.

“Oh that’s great I thought she cancelled, in that case you can make the popcorn sweetie.”

I take the shopping bag from her hand and head for the kitchen smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. Mom’s kitchen is a museum. White marble countertops, white cupboards and a fruit bowl nobody is allowed to take fruit from. One tiny mark on the marble and she goes straight to code red. I swear the woman is so obsessed with tidiness that it has to be a some sort of medical condition.

I put a saucepan on the stove turn the heat up to 6 and drop in a thick slice of butter. Always butter!! Never oil. When I was nine Mom tried a “healthier” version with half a bottle of oil and the popcorn tasted like a scented candle. She’s never admitted it and I’ve never let it go.

I pour in the corn seeds and put the lid on. Now I wait for the first pop. I take a cup from the cupboard and pour myself some juice, and that’s the moment the smell reaches me.

Burnt sugar. Smoke.

My hand stops... My whole body stops...The kitchen light seems to dim or maybe it’s just me, and suddenly I’m back in that hallway. The doors are breathing…The dark at the end of it is leaning closer. It’s lifting its hand and it’s about to say the word and this time I almost...

“Hazel!”

I jerk so hard that my elbow knocks the juice carton. “Fuck!” I look down. The cup is overflowing, a sticky orange river running over the white marble and off the edge, straight onto the floor.

And the glass in my hand has a hairline crack running right down its side. I stare at it I didn’t squeeze it. I know I didn’t squeeze it! My fingertips are hot almost stinging like I’ve been holding them over a stove.

“Hazel, dear?” Mom calls again from the living room.

I put the cracked glass behind the toaster and grab the mop. If she sees this she’ll freak out and that “dear” is not the kind that means dear. I wipe the counter then the floor then the counter again and that’s when I realize that the smell hasn’t gone away.

It’s getting stronger. And it’s coming from the stove.The popcorn!! I lunge for the pan and snatch off the lid. Black. Smoking. Every last kernel. “Fuck” Two disasters in five minutes. I tip the whole thing into the bin, tie the bag shut and crack the window before Mom’s nose figures it out.

So the smell wasn’t in my head. At least that part wasn’t.

The front door opens and shuts. “I’m back!” Ashley’s voice rings through the house, followed by the thud of her flopping onto the sofa. Of course she’s back already. Our houses share a fence, and her dad made a gate so that we could easily get to each other.

“Hazel dear” Mom calls, and this time it isn’t a question.

I wash my hands, put on my best innocent face, and walk to the living room.

Mom is seated on her favourite white sofa. Ash is right next to her phone in hand looking a little guilty.

Yep. She snitched.

“Sweetie,” Mom says, patting the cushion on her other side. “Ashley tells me you haven’t been yourself the past few days. Is everything okay?”

I glare at Ashley. Her mouth a very small sorry and looks at her phone like it’s suddenly fascinating.

“Uhm... no. Ahh... yes. Uhm.” I stutter, because I don’t know if I should tell her.

“Come on sweetie what’s wrong?”

“Mom...” I take a breath. “I’ve been having these dreams. For a few nights now… About this creature. It’s creepy-looking and...”

I start explaining but I don’t get far. The smile slides off Mom’s face. Not slowly…All at once, like someone pulled a plug. Her eyes drift over to the window to the jacaranda to the garden to whatever she sees out there that I don’t.

“Ahh,” she breathes. “It can’t be.” She shakes her head, whispering it to herself, then looks back at me in complete disbelief. And my mother my tidy, unshakeable, never-a-crease mother, has her hands folded in her lap so tight that her knuckles have gone white.

In sixteen years I have never seen those hands shake.

“But it’s time I guess” she says quietly.

She takes my arm and she sits me down next to her.

“Sweetie” she says. “There’s something important I have to tell you.”