I am at my grandmother’s house. I am sitting on the floor of her bedroom leaning over the bottom drawer of her old wooden wardrobe. I open the secret compartment and take out the case with her valuables. There a cold metallic pens, jewelry, photographs, buttons, etc.
I wonder if my other relatives are trying to secure their share of their inheritance by finding other secret stashed away treasures. I put the box back and get up. My grandma takes me to the train station.
The train ride is uneventful, I stare out at a never ending lake. Once at my station I get off and a friend greets me. I get the uneasy feeling that no one trusts me to get from one place to another on my own. My friend hooks her arm into mine and we walk over to the cab stop. For some reason all the cabs are purple. Feeling like I’m in a Cadbury add I get into the car.
My friend is happily chatting until she bends over in pain, holding her abdomen.
She leans back her face misted with sweat, she breathes heavily and clutches my hand tight. She says she had a miscarriage and is afraid she had another one.
She nervously wriggles her undies off from under her skirt. Nestled in her underpants are 26 small sunflower seeds. She starts crying and tells me that she is afraid to see her boyfriend again if she cannot have kids.
I hold her hand gently stroking it with my thumb, I close my eyes only to open them in my friends body.
I am waiting at the train station. My Boyfriend gets off last. I am nervous because of the having babies issue. I turn around before he sees me and walk to the same purple cab stop. There is only one cab left, I hop in and head into the city.
I meet up with two female relatives and have tea and tiny pastries in a fancy pastel colored café. I head for the bathroom, walking through a heavy velvet curtain that covers the entrance to the back. Once through the noises from the café are silenced and I walk along a small corridor. The walls, ceiling and even the floor is covered in thick velvet. I can feel it under my toes, I don’t remember having taken off my shoes though. I walk around the corner and through a glass door only to find myself on a busy street in a city in the sky.
This city is a mirror of the earth, gravity is outside the sphere so buildings grow inwards. The tallest buildings cross each other, some meeting in the middle of this … planet?
Time passes, I’m older and have two children along with a fancy apartment and a shitty relationship with my husband, boyfriend? I’m not sure.
I look at my son and remember that he is a mixture of human and alien DNA.
He looks a little like my boyfriend but more androgynous. Sometimes I mistake him for a girl, other times I see my father in a subtle movement or mannerism.
One afternoon just like any other I get into an argument with my husband. We are at the very top of a building. I get so angry and frustrated I jump off the building only to get away from him. He is shocked and thinks that I died.
I did not, in the center of the planet gravity ceases to exist because the pull is equal from all sides. I float to a near building and slip through a window, carelessly left open.
I hurry down a bazillion flights of stairs, lightly dizzy when I reach the bottom. I emerge on the street and head towards my apartment block.
On my way I see my husband with my sister, he proposes to her and then they happily step into an underground garage that is camouflaged against the glass façade of the building behind them.
It feels strangely good to be thought dead I muse and keep walking.