Timeline: Past
Point of View: Claudia
Location: Earth
Claudia Lafleur grew up in a house she did not like in a city roughly 300 miles away from Ralph Hughett. Her life growing up had been far more boring. She lived in the suburbs with her parents, and she was an only child. Her parents were well off and meant well, but were demanding of her in ways she found annoying. They expected her to do well in school, to get good grades, and on the weekends they expected her to study.
In the summers she had to read novels, and each summer was expected to read more novels than the previous one. She didn’t mind reading, in fact she enjoyed it. What she didn’t like were all the goddamn expectations. Why couldn’t she just do something because she wanted to, not because it was “important for her future”?
So Claudia did as kids do. She rebelled. Usually in harmless ways, but in ways that would get back at her parents demands. She was clever about it. When mom bought white and pink shirts, she said her favorite colors were black and neon green (even though she kind of did like the color pink). When her mom asked if she’d like to pierce her ears, she said yes, but she also wanted to pierce her belly button and eyebrows. When her mom asked if she’d like to try on some skirts, she politely said, “no, not really. I kind of like baggy pants, pants with lots of pockets.”
When her dad asked if she wanted to do any extracurriculars like dancing, gymnastics, or cheer leading (puke), she decided that her extra curricular time had to be something else. It took her awhile to decide what, but she settled on wrestling, because why the fuck not? It took a series of approvals and reviews, as the school tried to get her to do something that was not primarily a boy sport. In the modern day climate, the school inevitably didn’t have a choice. She got into wrestling and did surprisingly well. Boys were always timid around her, it seemed, concerned about inappropriately touching her, and she used that to her advantage. She’d fake defensive moves before slipping into unexpected reversals that put them off balance. She’d often finish by going in with the ole-trusty single leg takedown.
It was all a fun game she played, messing with her parents. But once she’d graduated high school, she realized that she’d faked her personality for so long she didn’t really know who she was. She’d spent most of her adolescence just fucking around with her parents. And why? Because it was a fun way to get back at them for being so goddamn demanding.
Now she was eighteen and she had choices to make. Her parents no longer had control over her (though they never really did - not really), but they still tried to encourage her to go to college. Claudia loved her parents despite everything (they were good people), but she didn’t think college was for her. She’d probably do well, as she’d been a 4.0 student in high school, but just didn’t want to do it, and for once could make her own choices.
She didn’t really want to do anything, and didn’t really know why.
She told her parents she was going to take a break from school for a while, just a short time, and focus on figuring out what she wanted to do with her life. They encouraged her to do that but to not wait too long. Once people stop going to school it seemed they never went back (or so they said). Claudia would be perfectly fine with that.
She told them she was moving out, and they tried to encourage her to stay home, to not get locked into anything prematurely, still hoping she’d change her mind about college. She still did it anyway. She figured she needed to get a studio apartment for herself just to think for a while, to figure some things out. They hesitatingly said okay. It was always a game of slight manipulation. She let them believe what they wanted while she fucked with them.
She wondered if she should get into politics. She’d probably be pretty good at it, and could fake any personality she needed to. She’d have to clean up her image, would have to discard the dark clothing, the exaggerated earrings. Would have to replace her whole wardrobe. That seemed like an awful lot of work. Besides, she was too young for all that. She needed to face a little more adversity, had to have a few stories behind her name, before chasing that kind of career. It did seem like a valid option later on, possibly even fun.
She wondered if maybe she should go to college, possibly consider careers like being a lawyer. She could talk her way in and out of anything, and that seemed like a good way to use her skills. But skills were just skills, and she was continuously lead back to that singular problem: what the fuck did she want to do? She had no answer for that one at all.
So she moved into her studio apartment, paid for by a job as a waitress at a local bar and grill that raked in good tips, and simply enjoyed being alive. Before she knew it, she was twenty-one, still a waitress, disconnected from her parents and at a different bar getting wasted with people she considered friends. They hopped from bar to bar that night, celebrating her twenty-first birthday, and Claudia found herself getting utterly hammered off shot after shot, beer after beer, jello shot after jello shot.
She told her friends they had to stop, that she was getting dizzy, and so they slowed down a little. Not completely, just a little. They stopped at a dance club, the neon lights running bright lings across her hazy vision as they danced. At least she thought she was dancing, as the pulse of the bass sent tremors through her body. It was entirely possible she was standing still as the world danced around her. How metaphorical was that? And how goddamn real?
A few shots later she was outside. She didn’t know where her friends were, and she figured she’d left them inside. Why had she left? She didn’t really know. It just seemed like a good thing to do. The lights and sounds had gotten to be too much.
She didn’t know where she was going, but that didn’t worry her too much. She’d get to where she needed to be. She always ended up where she needed to be, or at least somewhere where she could be.
She stopped in a field to piss. At least, she thought it was a field, as she stared up at the stars, hunched over like a wild animal. The stars up there were still burring together, but she could feel herself coming down, returning to a place of stability. She felt herself leaning forward, but tripped on her pants when she tried to correct her balance. Her face painfully landed in the grass. Maybe she wasn’t coming down, she thought with a laugh.
Mom and dad, look at me now, she thought, continuing to giggle. In the middle of nowhere, pants around my ankles. What am I doing with myself?
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Her giggling stopped with that last thought. She rolled over to look up at the sky, the grass tickling her legs and arms. “What am I doing with myself?” She said out loud.
She sat up quickly once she’d gotten a good look at her surroundings. She was no longer outside. At least, no longer in the correct outside. She was still outside, but it wasn't the right outside. She felt movement below herself and she screamed. The ground was covered in red worms, slithering and crawling underneath her exposed bottom.
She stood and pulled up her pants. She was still drunk, but felt her mind sharpening her vision a little, that feeling that seemed to come whenever she was drunk but her mind started realizing that she had to look semi-normal for a while. She was looking at the dancing worms, realizing they weren’t worms at all. It was the ground. The ground was red and made of dancing worms.
“Fuck I’m drunk,” she said, wondering if something a little trippier had made its way into her system. She’d done acid once on a dare, and would never do it again.
She swayed slightly as she looked ahead, the world around her uneasy. In front of her wasn’t the dark of night, but instead a vibrant red world.
“Fuck, I must have taken something,” she said to herself. She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes, trying to steady herself. She opened her eyes, but the red world remained. Had she died and gone to hell? Perhaps she’d been murdered in a field or struck by a car.
I have to get home, she thought, even if I’m high off my ass. So she started walking in the direction she thought she’d been going before she stopped to piss. She didn’t know where, but figured eventually her drunkenness would fade. She just had to work it out of her system.
She decided she was in a field and hadn’t yet left it. She thought the sidewalk should appear at some point, but it never did. Just that endless field of red worms with the occasional tree. The trees also had a red hue to them, but outside of that, they didn’t seem much different. Maybe there was a full moon out tonight making everything look odd. She looked up at the sky, trying to find the moon. Instead, her eyes burned as she stared directly into a massive red sun above her, a sun that had to be at least twice the size it was normally.
“What the fuck,” she said to herself as she shielded her eyes from the sun. It had been so big, even if it seemed to be a little darker than normal. No, it wasn’t night, and there was no moon. It was day and something was fucked about the sun.
With her hand over her eyes she nearly tripped and fell into a hole in the ground. She stumbled, arms flailing, until she recovered her balance. It wasn’t a particularly deep hole, perhaps a little deeper than she was tall, but it was excessively wide. There was a black substance at the bottom of the hole.
She looked up from the pit and out at the vast emptiness before her. There were many such holes out there, stretching far out into the distance. They were dots on the ground on the horizon as far out as she could see. She turned around, circling, taking in the terrain. There were no mountains or hills, only the flat, red-wormed land dotted with holes in the ground like pimples.
As she stared out at the nothingness before her, she felt awe-struck, then confused. Where was she, and how had she gotten there? She no longer felt as if she were high and tripping balls. Maybe she was dreaming, but it didn’t feel like that, either. It felt terrifyingly real.
She did the only thing she could do. She walked, avoiding the pits as she did.
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A few hours into her journey (she didn’t know how long, since she hadn’t worn a watch and her phone had ceased working), a peculiar thing happened in the sky. It brightened significantly and she had to cover her eyes, which had grown accustomed to the dim red world. She continued walking, but the source of the brightness soon appeared on the horizon. Before her, a small white dot grew, slowly lifting into the sky like a miniature moon that was excessively bright.
She couldn’t look directly at it, as it hurt her eyes to stare, but from her peripheral vision she could see that it was another star, a second sun. She turned around, looking to the other horizon, and saw the other sun, the large red one, disappearing on the opposite side.
She realized then that she was dreaming. She had to be. Because this place couldn’t be Earth. Earth had one yellow star, but this place had two. One was red, the other white.
She’d studied stars once as a part of her science classes, knew that it was more common for a system to be binary than solitary like Earth’s sun. Earth had a yellow dwarf star, a star that gave off a lot of light and would burn for many billion years. However, red dwarf stars were more common than yellow stars. At least in the Milky Way galaxy. The white dwarf, on the other hand, was a star that had burned off all its fuel and was in its final stages.
Her skin was burning, that feeling she would get whenever she was out on her father’s boat for too long in the summer. She looked around for cover, but there was nothing. It seemed she was in this planet’s version of a desert, but the ground wasn’t sand. It was still that odd, wormy red grass. Far off to her left she could see rows of trees, tall and bushy, but it was hazy in the distance, as if a mirage. Everywhere else around her was nothing but emptiness. To the right, far into the distance, it seemed she could make out a change in the terrain, possibly hilly or mountainous, but it was so far off she didn’t hope to reach it any time soon.
She opted for the cover of the trees, and walked toward them, her bare skin feeling painfully exposed. In the red hue of the planet, she couldn’t tell if she was burning, but it felt as if she were. Her skin would certainly be peeling that night.
She was thirsty. So thirsty. She hoped there’d be water near those trees when she reached them. She walked for what felt like ages. Finally the larger red sun disappeared behind her back and only the small, faint, white one remained above her. The air seemed to grow cooler with the red one gone, the same way the day became cooler on Earth once the sun disappeared on the horizon. With the red sun gone, the sky became darker still, similar almost to that of night. The white, soft sun above seemed like nothing more than the full moon.
She wondered how much time had passed, how long she’d been stuck in this other place. Her drunkenness had long since passed, instead turning into a headache, and she was devastatingly thirsty now. She felt as though she were growing weak.
As she walked, she noticed curiously the absence of life (unless one would consider the odd red grass a form of life). If she were on Earth, there would be bugs, birds, and mammals. Here, she hadn’t seen a thing. The only movement was the grass, and it moved on its own accord.
Again she considered that she’d gone mad, or that the nightmare had grown unreasonably long and it should be time to wake up.
There was a screeching sound behind her, almost like a howling, and a bright light flashed across the sky. She turned to watch it, as if it were a meteor falling to the planet. Yet it wasn’t a meteor. For the first time since she’d arrived, there was something familiar to her in this world. She turned and ran, seeing the line of trees in front of her approaching. She ran as hard as she could.
Behind her the flaming missile hit the ground, and the dirt (if it was dirt) shook underneath her feet. It was far enough away so that she wasn’t harmed, but she felt it still, the air seeming to reverberate with the impact. She felt herself scream, but continued to run. The trees were growing larger. If they were trees, that was. They moved funny, seemed excessively large, and were a deep, deep red color.
She dared turn around to look behind herself. There was a dark smoke in the distance. She’d just come from that direction not long ago. She thought about those pits in the ground that she’d walked around, and considered how lucky she was. She knew in her heart that there would be more to soon follow that first.
The only question was how much time she had. She was lucky, yes, but her luck could still run out. The trees were closer, but still seemed so far away. Would she make it? Even if she did make it, would she even be safe behind their cover?
She had to be. It was the only thing she could cling to, as the bombs rained down around her.