Falling

Chapter 1

I was a star, not the famous person kind of star, but the type that people saw when they looked up at the sky at night, the type that shines and sort of twinkles. Although to be frank, I was just this giant ball of hot gas...

I honestly can't tell you how it happened, one minute I was up there in space, doing my own thing you know, and then suddenly I was falling, straight down towards the colorful planet, Earth.

Everything got hotter, so hot in fact that I found myself wondering if I was dying, not that I knew if such a thing was possible, there weren't many stars around me, so I'd never heard of any dying... but the heat, it was really intense, and somewhere along the lines, I faded out a bit, and there was nothing...

Stars don't die do they?

I woke up and found myself in a really strange place, everything around me was green, kind of like those patches I used to see on Earth. I realized with a start that I was looking at grass, miles and miles of it. There's no grass in space...

And the sounds, there were sounds everywhere.

Some kind of whisper whenever the wind blew, birds calling out to each other, some croaking sounds somewhere in the distance, something drip-dripping... it was incredible really, like a kind of... music. The word was a foreign word, I'd never heard it, but it was just there at the back of my mind.

My whole body felt extremely heavy and I couldn't just float... strange. Also, even stranger still, I wasn't hot anymore.

I looked down at myself, trying to see what was wrong and I heard this strange shrieking sound, it took me a while to figure out the sound came from me, if I did exist anyway.

I just screamed...

Something was really wrong. Where I was round before, I was almost straight now, with four appendages, two above on opposite sides of a trunk-like body, hands, and two below also on opposite sides, legs. I also had...hair -again a foreign word- I had a shock of it on top of my body, it was silky, straight, and jet black like the sky at night.

Where were those words coming from?? I did not know what grass was, or the colors green and black and I certainly didn't know what hair was, but there they were, in my head, like some long forgotten memory remembered, like breathing... which I never did before.

I managed to stop screaming again, by telling myself it was all a dream, I'd just wake up and everything would go back to the way it was, I'd be a star again up in space, with the inky black universe around and the planets somewhere in the distance, and weightlessness, zero gravity.

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't wake up from the dream, which was gradually turning into a very bad nightmare.

So I did what I thought was best, I curled up there on that green grass and prayed really hard that it wasn't poisonous, even though I knew, the same way I knew what hair and grass were, that it wasn't poisonous, not unless I tried to eat it anyway. And at least it was soft.

Maybe when I woke up, I'd find out that everything was ok, nothing had changed, maybe it really was just a bad dream...

"I could swear this is where it crashed, I saw it yesterday, it was right here I tell you"

"Are you sure Rach, we can check out other places you know..."

I woke up to the sound of voices, one more high pitched than the other, and I started looking around for places to hide in but couldn't find any better than where I was curled up. So I decided to stay where I was and hoped they didn't come across me. It was dark out anyway, I doubt anyone would have seen me in the darkness.