Truffle Island

Prologue

You know that delicate place between consciousness, when you're not fully awake, but you know you're not asleep? When everything connects and disconnects and time is just so disorderly? When you're too dizzy to have full vision, and everything is still dark and you seem so... detached from your surroundings? Everything is kind of funny then. So close, but so far out of reach. So mismatched and nonsensical. I hated that feeling because I couldn't tell what was real and what was just my imagination.

What I could tell, was that my vision was cloudy. It was like a smoky haze that crept over a battlefield in the silent, deadly aftermath of a violent war. Like the early morning fog that drifts through a ghost town before the sun comes up. I couldn't see anything but shades of grey and the rough, indistinct silhouettes of what almost looked like chairs in front of me. Were they chairs?

The only sound I was able to hear was a sharp, agonizing ringing noise, but it was muffled. It sounded far away and enveloped by the opaque layer of uncertainty that clouded my consciousness, but slowly, it began to seem as if it was moving closer, becoming clearer with each passing second. I could only relate it to the ringing in one's ears that they would hear after a flash bang or other loud explosion went off.

When my mind came to, I realized that my body was still frozen; paralyzed. I couldn't move. I couldn't even feel my limbs. the most I could do was move my eyes, but no matter where I looked, everything looked the same. Cloudy and grey. Blurry and disfigured. Then my mind brought me to focus on the smell around me. Smoke. Heavy smoke.

In a split second, my lungs broke free from the paralysis my body was trapped in, and forced the thick smoky air out of my body. My attention was brought to my feet and my hands, which were holding onto something soft, almost like a cushion. It was a cushion, and it belonged to the grey chair I was sitting next to.

I didn't completely regain full consciousness until I heard the petrified sound of my little sister screaming my name from somewhere not too far away. That was when my memory returned. We were on a plane.

Slowly, my vision came back to me, revealing to me the disastrous, dismantled interior of the passenger plane we were in. I sat in the aisle with chairs on either side of me. Some of the chairs were ripped out and missing. Many of the overhead luggage compartments were open, and people's belongings were scattered across the plane. The light blue metal floor of the aisle was scratched and dented and broken. Ahead of me, towards the rear of the plane, was my sister.

"Hold on Journei, I'm coming!" I mustered all the strength I had to grab the chairs on either side of the aisle in front of me, and pull myself closer to my sister. With every movement I made, through the ringing in my ears, I could hear the creaking of the fragile, damaged, metal plane floor. I could feel the way it moved beneath the weight of my body, and I knew any moment it could give way and my life would be left in fate's hands while I plummeted to the ground that was who knew how many feet below me.

"Dezzy!" The pain in my 13 year old sister's voice hit me like a train.

I gripped the chairs harder and pulled myself closer. My sister's leg was stuck in the seats towards the back of the plane. We were the only two left on the plane. Behind me, at the front of the plane was a giant hole where the plane crashed into what looked like a mountain, but I wasn't sure. The only thing I could recall from before I came to was people screaming as they were ripped from their seats, right out through the hole in the front of the aircraft.

I reached for the next chair with my left hand. My body seemed to move on its own, with no actual effort or assistance from me. I felt like a puppet. Like a person trapped inside of a body that was being controlled by a larger force, and I had no say in what I did.