Our Guest Author Today is Ginger Strivelli

 We were together

“We were together. We were home. We were in our world whirling through our universe. It was a perfectly common day. We were in our right timeline and in our right dimension. We were living. Everything around us was normal. Nothing was amiss. We received no warning that it was all about to go badly amiss.

At first, we didn’t realize we were being dragged somewhere else, somewhere not normal. We just suddenly felt hot. Our planet is always cool. We have not traveled to other planets in our universe. We did not know if we had been teleported to some other planet that was hot. We wondered if we stumbled into some time portal and had traveled not to another planet but to the prehistoric past of our own planet, which was thought to have been much warmer many millennia ago.

However, we have not been taken to another planet in our universe or to another time on our planet. We hadn’t even been taken to some parallel universe as the place we found ourselves was too unlike our universe to be at all parallel. It was paranormal. It was totally unfathomable. We just knew we had to have been spirited away to some wholly different dimension.

We came to this dimension as one. We were all one being just as we were at home. When we arrived, we did not yet know the horror of this dimension’s beings’ having singular existences. We learned that fright when we were moved from the heated entry point by the hands of two different mythical beings. Two plural beings! At their touch, we instantly telepathically understood that the creatures of this dimension are all different. They are separate, somehow. They are alone and apart! We were terrified when we learned of this supernatural affliction. If given more time we would have pondered how they managed such an unimaginable fate. We would have come to feel sorry for them if we’d had a little time. We did not have that much time though to think.

These monstrous creatures loomed over us, huge and round. They looked down upon us with these expressions of happiness or madness, we couldn’t tell which. We didn’t know what they had planned for us as they picked us up in their fleshy limp hands and put us on cold stone. Our warmth started to leak away at once. We were glad because of that. We were not used to being warm. It might have killed us, we had thought when we were in the warm place. We were mighty relieved to be removed, even by the monsters but only for a few precious moments.

We calmed as we cooled but then began to contemplate what the monsters had brought us to their sickly twisted dimension for. What would become of us? Would we become different entities like the monsters were? Would we any moment be jerked back to our own dimension? We prayed to our descendants that we would be taken back home as suddenly as we had been ripped from there. We simply could not take any more fear of this strange place and its stranger multiple beings.

Just like our random instantaneous arrival into this dimension, suddenly our nightmare took an evil turn. Our worry and fear was replaced with sheer terror of a fiendish kind! We experienced the most sinister sensation. It took us a moment to figure out what had happened to us. Part of us was suddenly just gone. Part of us was dead but not ascended. Part of us was nowhere, not back home, not in the afterlife, not elsewhere, but nowhere. Nothing like that had ever happened to us in our dimension. We had no understanding of such bizarre magic or science. How could such a thing even be possible, even in this different dimension? We were so shocked we stopped communicating and just screamed inconsolably in discordant harmony.”

***

“Grandmother, can I have more?” Luna asked as sweetly as the cookie she had just eaten. “They are such whittle bitty gingerbread men.”

“How can Grandmother say no to your whittle bitty face!” Violet said to her granddaughter. “You can have two more, right now my sassafras! I’ll make us some hot chocolate and we will watch the movie about Santa Claus and his reindeer while we eat them all. I can’t wait. When I was a little girl just like you, my grandmother made gingerbread men for me and her to eat while we watched it.”

***

“Our screams all stopped in a speechless stupor as it happened again...and again! We clung to ourselves, what was left of ourselves. We had a flash of a thought of trying to figure out a way to make it stop but it was hopeless. We had no idea why, how, or what was happening to us. We had no chance of stopping what we did not even know.

***

“Grandmother?” Luna called from the couch as she precariously balanced the plate full of gingerbread man cookies. “Hurry, it is about to start!”

Violet rushed from the kitchen herself balancing two cups of steaming hot chocolate. “I’m here, my sassafras. Oh, no I forgot the marshmallows!” She sat the cups on the coffee table and ran back to the kitchen.

“Grandmother! Can I have a cinnamon stick to stir my hot chocolate with, like you use?”

“Sure, my sassafras!” Violet came leaping back onto the couch beside her granddaughter just as the toothpaste commercial ended and the movie started. She put marshmallows and cinnamon sticks in their cups. She hugged her granddaughter as she bit a head off one of the gingerbread men and handed another one to Luna. Luna copied her grandmother’s beheading bite, giggling.

***

“Oh, how we were panicking as again and again parts of us just vanished, gone from all time, all space, and all dimensions. We tried to discuss our doomed fate. We tried to bemoan how we had lost all hope. Nevertheless, we could only wail and sob. It was unreal. We still didn’t understand what was happening to us, but it kept happening and happening until there was nothing of us left. We were together but gone.

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Ginger Strivelli is an artist and writer from North Carolina. She has written for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Circle Magazine, Third Flatiron, Autism Parenting Magazine, Silver Blade, Cabinet of Heed Literary Journal, The New Accelerator, and various other publications for thirty years. She loves to travel the world and make arts and crafts. She considers herself a storyteller entertaining and educating through her writing.