Scene three
By Don Marlin
The temperature of the ice cold well water on my face didn’t offset the pain in my right side, but it did clear away the light sleep and shock in my facial features. Mary’s facial angst didn’t change. After we ran lockstep out of the room to catch our breath and I picked up a flashlight and hammer in the drawer of the kitchen, we returned to our bedroom and turned on all the lights. Even with the yellowed light of the 25-watt bulbs in the room making the shadows disappear from all the corners, there was still a faint cobalt blue coming from George II. Words did not come out of my mouth and neither one of us could breathe in or out as we returned to the sleeping faces of Richard and Sally in the center of the tarnished-edged mirror.
“What am I staring at, Vince? Is this a dream? What are we looking at? This can’t be real?” Mary said with unstable lips.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” I kept shaking my head, and knew I was awake because my right clavicle hurt on each shake.
“That’s Richard and Sally, right? Sleeping?” she said. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the mirror but slowly said to Mary that I felt awake, my body ached, my blood is still wet on the bandages, and I feel the hammer’s weight in my hand, but couldn’t reason why I would use it or what it was to protect us from. Though we were on the verge of screaming between each other, the peaceful faces of our New Englander friends just kept on sleeping.
“I see it too, Mary. Looks like their four-post Carriage House Rice bed in their bedroom in Somers”.
“Are you nuts? Are you awake? How can you look at the bed? That’s Richard and Sally in it!”
“Look, let’s calm down. Let’s walk out of the room, put away this hammer before I do something stupid, and start some coffee. Neither one of us is going to sleep now.” After we put on some coffee, we went to the second bedroom to find some clothes so we didn’t have to reenter the bedroom again, gathered our thoughts and tried to reconcile what we were witnessing as we sat around our restored French pine farm table.
“This is just crazy.” Mary said with a slow exhaust.
She took the Nutri-Grain bar from my hand with the wrapper still on it and threw it hard on the floor where I knew it was now a crumpled mess. I hate to eat those things with a fork. They are just so good fresh out of the wrapper with some of the vanilla nut coffee we always have in the morning. However, this was not a normal morning; maybe I needed to change things up to clear my head. “Their faces are so real.” I said. “It is like we are watching them through a window or a portal and even though we are yelling loud enough to wake up our homestead neighbors the mirror is see-through and not a two-way speaker. I could hear Richard breath.” I tried to explain.
“What the … you could hear them?” Mary exploded.
“Honey, I see them, hear them; I even think that we are looking at them sleeping in their bedroom in real-time as we stare into George II.”
“Vince, how can you be so calm? Shouldn’t we call the police or someone?” Mary’s explosion continued to effervesce.
“Look, we are awake in our kitchen, it’s Saturday, August 10, 2010, we are witnessing something that is unbelievable but obviously not a threat to our lives. It doesn’t make sense to call someone since the police can’t help. There isn’t anyone out there like a Ghostbusters group. We just have to wrap our hands around this and try to see if this is temporary like a daydream or if it is something that is lasting and is real,” I said.
“Vince, you are way too damn rational.”
“Mary, we both are a witness to this.”
“Vince, you say that like this is a crime!”.
“No. No. No. No, Mary, no crime. We just have to…”
Mary started to froth like basaltic magma and out came a “What? Catalog this event like we are gridding out the collapsed woodshed artifacts for the Forest Service?”
“No. No. No. Just calm down.” I said. “Let’s finish this coffee, splash water in our faces again and walk into the bedroom again and see if this charade, or reality, is still something we have to deal with and try to understand what is going on.”
Mary shook with the ambiance of an earthquake tremor. “But it isn’t very comforting that you are taking such a scientific approach to a portal in our bedroom to our friends in Somers. This is just a freaky event!” The lava hit the sea again.
“I know. I know. I know,” I mumbled. “I just don’t know how else to approach what is happening. Come on, let’s go back in.”