The Forgotten

Wake Up Call

I jolt up in my bed, the images of my dream flash before my eyes once more before they start to slowly disappear. Hal the images and events have left my mind before I can even think about it any further. As it is all the images and things that happened are fading and very vivid, I only remember some parts of the dream, others are completely blank. I roll over to my bed side table and quickly turn on the red lava lamp that resides on my bed side table. I take out my small notebook, never failing to run my hand over the soft velvet it’s covered in. I write down what I remember from the dream, or the little I do now. I remember seeing flashes of a little girl with her parents in the woods, her sister was there as well. The girls had long straight black hair and the darkest brown eyes, the other had the same raven black hair but with electric blue eyes. I remember seeing the girl in the woods, she was happy. As I jot down the notes I experience an epiphany. Those girls in the woods were me and my sister Ebony. And the parents, must have been our parents. I quickly put the notebook and pen back away in the top draw of my mahogany bedside table. I haven’t seen my parents for years, 11 years to be exact. They disappeared one day, never to be seen again. I don’t remember what happened, as a matter of fact I don’t remember much of my childhood at all. My earliest memory that I have is of my sister, we were simply playing outside the house with our Barbies. I was about seven at the time, my sister being ten, it was after our parents disappeared. I don’t really remember anything before that. I shake every thought about my parents out of my head. Somehow every thought of them terrifies me, as if something happened.

I quickly look around the room, moonlight pours into the room, shadowing the bed and leaving a silhouette of my body on the dark floor boards. The clock on the bedside table reads four thirty, early enough to look out the window and see the light of the sun slowly creeping up over the distant mountains. I step out of bed and immediately feel the cold of the wooden floor boards under my feet, the sound of the floor boards moaning at the weight of my feet make me pull back. I curl back up under my deep red sheets, and as if radiating heat they instantly warm me. I survey the room, still terrified of my dream. My mahogany dresser directly opposite my bed stands tall, almost intimidatingly, the mirror above it luminating the reflection of the moon from the small window that resides to the wall of my bed. The door, which I left open, is now closed, slightly bending on its hinges. Outside my window I can hear the almost soundless chirping of birds in the distance. The birds are almost melodic and signing songs. I look in the mirror again, trying to look outside for any signs of life. I can see our small shed at the far side of our property and the rusted white picket fence surrounding our part of the huge landscape.

Me, my sister, her daughter and my grandmother all live on a 40 acre property in the middle of Mist in central Queensland. I have lived in Mist my whole life; it’s a small country town, logically in the middle of nowhere. It has the total population of 300 people but dips and rises below and above this count. One person dies, two are born, two people die, one is born, that type of thing. Our house is a very old Queenslander; grandma says it has been in our family for years. On the outside it looks like a rundown shed that had been trampled by a herd of bulls. The dark wood that lines the floors is splintered and fading from the sunlight radiating down on a daily basis. The contrasting wood on the walls is also fading and splintered, my niece, Celeste has caught many a splinter in her hands and feet from the walls and floor boards. The veranda fence tilts slightly and creeks if pressure is put on it, which happens a lot. Amazingly all our windows are still completely intact, the reason this is amazing is the simple fact that we have vandalizing teenage boys running around constantly. Many of our neighbors have been woken up in the middle of the night from said boys throwing rocks through their windows. The window panes on the other hand are just as bad as the floors and walls, splintered, fading and just plain gross.