47.5 minutes. Prompt at the end.
The street I lived on was a quiet street. I knew this. I was comforted by the easily sloped sidewalks and the well-maintained lawns in front of each cookie-cutter house. The houses weren’t as bland as they sound though. Rather than a stale box of nilla-wafers, our neighborhood and its tightly packed houses were more like a Tupperware container of Gran-Ann’s most eclectic gingerbread cookies during the holidays. You could easily say they were all the same cookie and baked by the same woman, but each was crisply different.
I also knew every corner of these quiet streets. The bump in front of Mr. Lewis’ house rolled nicely under my bike on the weekends. The shade under the tree near the Reynolds’ was our saving grace during the hot summers just a few months ago.
It seemed like every corner also knew me. It’s difficult to put into words, this feeling. But the feeling you get when you sit next to a stranger is so much different than when you sit next to a friend who has known you for years. This neghborhood and all of its bumps and shady repreives was like that kind of friend. It knew me.
What happened next wasn’t what you’d expect of a lifelong friend.
I was off to school, like any good kid of those days. Before the days of divine independence (otherwise known as the internet), I couldn’t do much to contest the boredom of waiting for the bus. I stood. I sat. I half-sat-half-leaned against the wall. I thought about my lunch. The rice and kielbasa Mom prepped the night before was one of my favorites. The same rice and kielbasa that somehow spurred the ire of Rachel. She was the girl who was just one of the guys. Just one of the asshole guys though. I don’t think anyone appreciated the friends she held. For real though, how does someone make fun of rice and sausage?
It was during this mind-trek that I heard them for the first time. It was like a softened tapping on a cold smooth surface set to a rhythm that was odd. It transfixed you a little. At the same time though, it sounded like an exhausted creep, one who ran too fast to keep up behind you during gym class. I re-balanced my weight off of my wall-based stance and glanced to the right. What I saw didn’t really make a lot of sense.
I saw three wolves. They were huge. I had never seen a dog that size before. The biggest I had ever seen was Gran-Dan’s Border Collie (Shen was her name; she was nice). These wolves had to have been nine times the size of Shen, maybe ten. The one in the front was grey, and the two behind it were silver. One could say they were grey too, but there’s a distinct difference between grey and silver and this distinct difference was the same for the wolves. The two in the rear shimmered.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This was my street. This was my home street. I looked behind me wildly and quietly as I hugged the back end of the bus stop. Maybe this was a dream and I’d see a castle or a giant tree fort where JT’s house was. This would be the clear signal that there was nothing real about this situation and therefore nothing to fear, but it was still JT’s house behind me. It was still his stupid poster hanging on his bedroom window. I blinked a few times to make sure. JT’s window poster of Pikachu stared back at me.
I slowly turned my head back towards the animals to assess their approach. I only saw one. The grey wolf was looking directly at me. It wasn’t looking at my legs, arms, or general shape of my body against the bus stop. It was looking directly into my eyes. Somehow, itsgaze kind of hurt. And then I realized it: the other two silver wolves were gone. The grey wolf was alone in the street, hunched down as if it had a bush to hide behind, as if it was stalking me now. I stepped out of the bus stop and immediately felt my heart sink. The soft tapping accelerated from zero to sixty and I knew the silver wolves were after me. I lunged forwards, each foot quickly exceeding the next. I could hear the steady and fast approach of the wolves. I was no match for them.
I felt like I had only gone a dozen feet for so before I felt them on me. A firm grasp around each of my shoulders closed tightly. It felt secure. My legs stopped moving, and I fell limp, ready to give myself to this strange end. Though my body went limp, my posture straightened. My shoulders went up yet my head drooped down still. I saw my hair feather gently in the wind and my toes drag on the sidewalk. I was gaining speed. I saw my toes lift above the sidewalk. This had to be a dream. A moment later I was far removed from my previous comfort of the bus stop. I was soaring above the wolves that still looked up at me and chased my toes, but they were well out of reach. Well, I guess I was well out of reach. I finally decided to look at what was holding on to me. It had to be some kind of devil spawn. A harpy. Maybe a winged succubus. But it wasn’t.
The wind rushed wildly between us and my hair thrashed around. I saw a eagle. An eagle nearly as large as those wolves. It’s brown feathers contrasted by its golden eyes made for quite a sight. It stared ahead for some time and finally down to me.
“Don’t worry,” it said, “I’m not going to eat you. Can’t say the same for those wolves though.”
Fading to black, my eyes closed and my head went limp. I didn’t really understand it then, but I was in for one wild weekend.
Today, while running from a dog, you discover that your feet are slowly leaving the ground.
Writing Under the Influence 