A Metaphysical, visionary, fantasy, adventure:
Still holding my head, I started to follow the bird that looked like Lady into the forest until I realized what I was doing.
I was following something into somewhere without questioning what was happening. It was like getting into a strange car with an unknown person.
Would I ever do that? No. Even if the person looked like someone that I knew? Well, perhaps. But birds look almost alike, don’t they? So it wasn’t as if I could tell Lady from another bird just like her.
Almost too late I saw the bird fly back towards me, bent on either knocking me over again or pulling my hair. Either way, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I dropped to the ground and curled into a little ball and stayed there.
Probably looked pretty stupid, but at least I didn’t get my hair pulled. I lifted my head just a bit and saw the bird sitting on the ground in front of me. I got the distinct impression that she was not happy with me for thinking that she looked the same as other pileated woodpeckers that looked like dinosaurs or dragons.
Birds, animals, insects could tell the difference between each other, why couldn’t I? She turned her face sideways and looked directly into my eyes. Something about those eyes were familiar, and at that moment I knew for sure that it was Lady from Earth who was sitting there. I reached out to touch her head, and she pulled her head back and gave me a look that I wouldn’t forget. No touching. “Okay, okay. So you’re Lady. Now, what is this place?”
I took a big breath in and smelled the woods. It smelled like the forests back home. Loamy, cool, a city of insects and animals mostly invisible unless you lived there and learned to see. Before stepping into the portal, I had been learning a little about the forest behind our house. Learning more about this forest was going to be fun. Maybe it would give me a clue as to where I was, assuming I wasn’t dreaming. Didn’t that voice say, Erda?
Screwing up my courage, I decided it was time to explore. I stood up, and for the first time since I tripped and fell on my face, I looked down at myself and screamed.
Who was this person? Was it me? What looked like my hands felt the clothes that I had on. They were not what I was wearing when I was standing in the door of the portal. I had been wearing what I always wear, like most girls my age: skinny jeans, t-shirt, and at the last minute I had grabbed my favorite soft sweater.
Suzanne had told me I couldn’t bring anything other than what I was wearing through the portal. Everything else would dissolve in the transfer. What I needed would be provided for me.
What she had neglected to tell me was that I would arrive in different clothes. I ran my hands over whatever it was that was covering my legs. They felt almost like the leggings I wore in the winter and looked like the ones that woman by the tree had been wearing.
However, they felt completely different from anything I had worn before.
These leggings were still soft like winter leggings, but much stronger. They were as tight as my skin but so lightweight that if I hadn’t seen that I was wearing them, I would have thought I had nothing on. Scary thought, that. The shirt was the same material as the leggings. Close to my body, but soft and comfortable.
As a reader of strange stories, I wondered if I was caught up in a dream, like in one of my books. Ones where people ended up in bodies that weren’t theirs. Because not only were the clothes weird, so was I. Older. Not twelve anymore. The tight clothing proved that. Not me. At least not the me that lived on Earth.
Listen and read on …
Read Shatterskin, the first book in The Return To Erda , and fall in love with these characters that choose friendship, goodness, and faith in each other in order to defeat evil.
READ and LISTEN anywhere you buy your books and audio.
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
