An Immigrant: A Short Story

A letter should not be able to reunite you with someone who has gone missing. But sometimes it does happen, and it happened to me. The sun was a dazzling gold, the clouds looked like little pieces of cotton candy, and the trees were becoming a golden yellow. The trees… They gave me a very strange, no, eerie feeling. The wind blowing through them made it sound like they were talking to me. I tried to convince myself that trees couldn’t talk, but the sound became more and more comprehensible. But just as was on the verge of understanding, my mother called me in for dinner. I hesitated, deciding if I should stay until I got the message, but I had eaten nothing since I came back from school and I was ravenous. So, in the end, hunger won out. I

Warning? Prepared? Who was this we being talked about and who thought that I would be going on a mission? I would never be prepared for a mission! I am only 13 years old, fatherless boy. Why couldn’t I have a dad to help me? He would know how to help me with this. My dad, well, he may or may not be dead. He just… disappeared one day. I had only had a father until I was ten years old. Then he was gone. It still pained me to think about him. We had been best friends, me and my dad, with his straight, brown hair and bright blue eyes, we were almost look alikes. But there was no dad to help me this time. I barged up and down the lawn kicking rocks, hurtling branches through the air, and screaming things one would not think to see from a kid so polite in a right mind. But I was not in a right mind, for a note with so much depth and threat would put anyone’s mind in a frenzy. After I had finished being angry, the full realization of what was happening flooded over me. I was going to be taken away from my family, from friends, from home, from everything I owned. But worst of all, I had no choice. I was being forced to walk into something I would never be able to prepare myself for and would probably die as a result of. This all came to me in a matter of seconds and in another instant I was on the floor, sobbing over all these thoughts. When I was done crying, I wiped the snot of my nose with my sleeve, stood up, and walked towards the house. I felt numb inside, like a

Just once. I passed my hand over the first wall, the second wall, the third wall and found nothing. Just as the sourness of defeat filled my mouth, my hands fell into empty darkness. Which should not have been possible. Because there were four walls in a room, not three. But there was no fourth wall. Just more empty, black darkness. Which meant… yes, I was right! As I stumbled forward, the air became less stale, easier to breath. I gulped in the renewed air, as old as it might be. I seemed to be in a passageway, or even a hallway! I started running, hoping the corridor wouldn’t end. And it didn’t. But soon I realized just how long it actually was. I slowed, deciding to save my energy and started thinking. The day that this all started. The letter that had removed me from my family. The letter that could kill me. Slowly, I started noticing little things in the walls. Roots. Bugs. Bones. Carvings of all sorts of gruesome things. Bloody wars. Deathly diseases. Slowly dying people. They became clearer and clearer until I realized that, finally, the sun was shining on my body. I screamed in happiness and started running towards the exit that was now so prominent. As I stumbled out into the fresh, crisp, clean air, the tears that I had been hiding for so long poured down my face like little streams of happiness. I laid down in the long, flowered grass. In the distance, you could