She sat in the garden sobbing, surrounded by roses. She looked around at the garden , wondering if she was truly alone in the moonlight. She sat quietly for a moment, listening carefully to the wind carrying leaves past her. As she got up, she glanced at the dark trees off in the distance and noticed something rustling in the bushes and turned around. She waited a few moments and nothing came. She gathered her breath and walked home, wondering why she was even there. She woke up the next morning, sunlight warming her face, she sat up with no memory of the incident last night. She ran down the stairs and into the kitchen, the air filled with the smell of breakfast. She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of home, but when they shut she didn’t see what she expected. When she closed her eyes, she saw a flicker, a flash of a memory. It was a dark night in a garden, and there was something behind the trees. She knew it, but she was pulled out of the memory the moment she saw it and she wondered if it was even hers.
***
Three weeks later, she woke up in her bed, still getting glimpses of something she couldn’t put her finger on, something she had nothing to do with. She had no idea what she was seeing, but she was quite sure that she was not the one that was supposed to be seeing those memories, so she fled the house without a word to anyone and set out in the cool autumn morning in search of answers.
She had been walking on a path for hours, and she tried to make herself believe that her mother wasn’t worried and that she wasn’t absolutely, completely lost. She kept walking for a couple more minutes until she got to a stone entrance and went through. She discovered that it was a garden exactly like the one in her “visions,” but she hadn’t ever been there before, and unlike her dreams, all the plants were dead or dying, not to mention the garden was in ruins.
She surveyed the garden for some time but nothing looked at all mysterious, until she found the edge of the garden leading into the forest, and that’s when she realized. She needed to get out of there because there had been something in the woods. There had been something there the whole time, watching her. So when she got up and started running, something was running behind her. But she didn’t look back.
By the time she got home, there was her mother sitting there wondering where she’d been, an angry look on her face. She ran right past her, ignoring the calls from her mother and went straight to her room. She took out her favorite book and opened it to a random page, but she saw a dying rose placed there. She took it out and stared at it, its petals falling one by one, until she heard her mother knock on the door. She climbed out the window and into the backyard, and she ran back to the garden, determined not to leave as early as last time.
To Be Continued…