Spiritus Collection

The Playing Field

   There were three things I noticed when I woke up in the field. It was dark, I was wearing only my underwear, and there was a strange trunk next to me. All signs that something abducted me during the night.

     The last thing I remembered was that I was talking to a friend while walking home from a party. It was a long stretch of road through the forest, one that I walked on going all the way back to my childhood. I was buzzed, but not so bad that I couldn't walk straight.

     Because I was buzzed, the conversations were often heavy, which was a good out for any party I went to. My friend Jenny was always my go-to because we went all the way back to kindergarten. The topic was about how much of a disappointment I felt like in comparison to my older siblings, my sister Seanna in particular.

     It was just after we decided to switch the topic to colleges that I saw the road. It was weird, as I said before, I walked this stretch of road since childhood, and knew everything about it right down to the stone placement. I had never come across this road before. And it wasn't a new road, it looked old.

     There were all the signs of it being old, the cracks in the concrete, the potholes, the messy signs of existing in nature. The cracks and potholes weren't as strange as Michigan's road commission was more concerned in having nice buildings instead of the roads. It was the dead trees that were along its side that disturbed me the most. Dead, while the rest of the trees were still alive. There's no way that dead trees would be in a line like that.

     Then the fog rolled in, and I could feel the fight-or-flight reflex kick in. There was something incredibly wrong with this forest. I told Jenny that I would call her back and slid the phone back into my pocket. As I turned toward my home to sprint home, a feeling of extreme drowsiness hit me.

     And then I woke up here. Wearing nothing but my underwear. After taking a minute to look around, and after finding no one in nearby, curiosity overtaking any sense of concern I had. The trunk had no lock on it, nor latch. All I needed to do was to lift the top, and I could see what was in there.

     For some reason my brain registered it as the oddest thing in the field. It wasn't that I woke up here in my underwear, it wasn't the creepy darkness of the field. No, it was the unlocked, latch-less trunk. I decided to investigate the trunk a little before I opened it. I didn't know if there would be any kind of trap, and I didn't want to find out the hard way.

     There were clothes inside. Not just any clothes, a running outfit consisting of a torn tank top and shorts set. I stared at the outfit inside the trunk as I debated whether or not I should put it on. I didn't know where it came from, and in this strange field, I wasn't certain if I could trust anything in this strange field. 

     In the end I decided that if I found someone, I didn't want to give the impression that I was a hooker who took a wrong turn. While the tank top revealed my midriff, and the shorts hugged tightly on my skin, I could easily say that I got lost while on a late-night jog. That was when I felt the migraine.

     I say migraine because there's no other type of head pain that I can think of that could come close to what I felt. I'd like to say that I didn't fall over, but I did. That was how painful this head pain was. It was almost like the pains Seanna and my older brother James had when they went through puberty.

     And that when it hit me. There was something about this place that granted me psychic abilities, and I'm going through the stages that my siblings had. I may not have remembered everything about what psychics went through when their powers manifested, but I remembered how to deal with the pain.