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Blue: The Calling

By Kiah Cross

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The house was small, white, and ordinary, — a 1940’s bungalow with a blue front door. Had there been an orange and white cat on the top step, it would have been a greeting card. Proud shutters framed the windows. The planter boxes were appropriately bursting with petunias and geraniums. The windows themselves, small squares, reflected a cold white sky, though the sky behind me was blue and laced with clouds. It was not my house. I stood in front of it in utter silence, feet planted, arms at my sides. No cars drove by on the street behind me. No birds twittered or flapped in the trees. I watched, and waited.
Suddenly flame spurted from the windows above the geraniums. Pieces of the roof shot skyward and seemed to hang in the air. Oxygen-hungry flames leapt up out of the roof hole. Fire moved in every direction. The planter boxes and shutters blackened, sagged, then disintegrated. Near the base of the house, where pieces of siding remained, the paint blistered and curled quickly in the heat. The roar was deafening. I tried to cover my ears, but couldn’t move my hands. I tried to scream, but my throat made no sound. The intolerable heat, and the horrible smell of things that shouldn’t be burning, but were burning nonetheless, assaulted my senses. My muscles were stiff and unusable, my legs rooted to the sidewalk. Not even my eyeballs moved when I directed them to. I couldn’t look away from the yawning black and orange tear in the fabric of the neighborhood where the house had stood just moments before. Gathering every bit of strength I had, I managed to bend at the waist. I sat straight up in bed, gasping in the darkness, dripping with sweat. My dog, Chump, joined me on the bed, desperately trying to gain access to my face with his tongue.
“I’m fine, Chump, stop! Yuck! Enough, ok?” I said, fending him off.
He slunk to the floor, resting his chin on the edge of my bed, and stared balefully up at me. He had just been trying to help. I scratched his ears for a moment while I caught my breath and waited for my heart to return to it’s normal functions. I could still smell the acrid smoke, and feel the effects of the heat on my face. It was the second night in a row that the same dream had awakened me. Vivid dreams weren’t new to me, I’d been having them for as long as I could remember. Some were more disconcerting than others. Some left strong scents in my nostrils and strange sensations in my limbs. They ranged from pleasant to bizarre, ordinary to terrifying. This was only the second time I’d endured that particular dream, and I hoped it would be the last.
Sweat had soaked through my t-shirt and bedding. Gross. I crept out of bed, still shaking, and stripped the sheets, balling them under my arm. At least my mother would be pleased to find I’d done the laundry again without being asked. Quietly, so as not to wake my parents, I snuck downstairs to shower and start the wash. It was early Monday morning, and I had three exams to look, or not look forward to: history, mythology, and personal finance. At least Dad had promised to drive me to school so I could avoid an extended ride on the big yellow bus. Breakfast and school were up next.
My last class that day, algebra, was almost physically painful. Numbers tended to bounce around the inside of my skull like pinballs in a machine, never finding the proper channel to drop through… the channel which would rack up points in my column in the grade book. When the final bell rang to signal the end of the school day, I practically sprinted to my locker then out to the parking lot to meet Millie. I stood on my tiptoes on the short wall that divided the grass from the sidewalk and scanned the crowded sidewalk for her. I spotted her siren-red head and wound my way through the crowd to join her. We didn’t speak right away. We knew each other well enough to not have to. We simply fell in step beside one another and headed down the street together, destined for her house. Sweet, smart, and loyal, Millie Gorse had the attention span of a fruit fly. She was my best friend. Almost my only friend, actually. She lifted my spirits when I got too serious; which was almost daily. I, in turn, regularly reminded her that her feet needed to actually touch the ground from time to time. Not just the tiptoes. The whole foot. She did almost everything at top speed, and rarely toppled. I, on the other hand, toppled regularly - Literally. I fell down quite a lot. Sixteen years old, running at full tilt across a field and BAM! Face full of leaves. My mother blamed it on accelerated physical growth; my brain just never knew what size I was or how to maneuver me through space safely. I thought I was just a klutz.
September was giving way to October, and the summer heat had just begun to let up.. The hills were still bare and brown, parched by the summer heat, the air devoid of moisture. The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet felt itchy, and I scratched my initials in the dry skin of my arm. I had forgotten to apply lotion. We walked the eight blocks to Millie’s house, using our feet to pop open the green spiky balls that littered the streets under the chestnut trees, rescuing the shiny brown nuts from the husks. The sky was clear, and there was a pleasant breeze. Millie was reporting on the new exchange student from Australia.
“He’s gorgeous,” he said. “You’ll die when you see him.”
I doubted that. My heart didn’t tend to flop for the kind of guys that Millie’s heart flopped for. The year before, Millie had been more like me…. Committed to her books and her thoughts. Over the summer, however, she had discovered boys. She loved the silly, fluttery feelings evoked by just the right guy. In contrast, the only thing I feared more than feeling wobbly and fog-brained at the very sight of a boy was the idea of someone finding out that I felt that way. A few guys at school held the irritating ability to make me feel weak in the knees and I avoided them like the plague. I was convinced that boys were a weakness, an Achilles heel, an affliction of the horrible, sidelining type that keeps people from living out their dreams.
Straight down Cherry Street, right on Adams, left on Crestwood, left on Shane Avenue. I could almost have made the trip with my eyes shut. About halfway down street, still quite a distance from Millie’s house, I stopped short and stared. There it stood: the little white house with the blue door and shutters, complete with flowering window boxes and neat green shingled roof. A chill ran up my spine.
“What’s up?” Millie asked, following my gaze to the little bungalow.
“Did this house just get painted, or has it always looked like this?”
“It’s looked like that as long as I can remember.”
“You know who lives there?”
“Just a young couple. They don’t have kids. The lady takes good care of the yard, so Mom’s impressed. Why?”
“I haven’t noticed it before.” I said, still staring. Even the little white bird painted on the front of the old fashioned letter box beside the front door was familiar.
“Why would you notice it, Kiah. It’s just a house.” Millie moved on ahead of me. I didn’t follow.
“Well I dreamt about this house, Millie. I dreamt it blew up right in front of me. I’ve had the dream twice, as a matter of fact. The place was totally destroyed.”
She stopped again, and turned back, giving the cottage a second look.“Oh yeah? Well that’s weird. Are you sure it’s the same house you dreamt of?”
“Yes, exactly the same, right down to the color of the door and the kinds of flowers in the windows.”
Millie snapped her gum and shrugged. “You must have seen it before when you came over to my place, and then your brain just made up a crazy dream about it. It just means you’re morbid, but we already knew that.”
I still didn’t move.
“The house is fine, Kiah. It was just a dream. Can we go now?”
She was right. The house seemed fine. But I wasn’t so sure I’d seen it and then fashioned a morbid dream about it. There was more to it than that. I had the vague, nagging sensation that I needed to look close, pay attention, and remember. I’d had vivid dreams before; scenes that I’d later watched unfold before my eyes, as if from a movie I’d already seen. It was like a vivid form of déjà vu. I knew, for instance, when I was six years of age and Dad announced we were moving, that we would buy a house with three white columns and a pink flowering plum tree in the front yard. When I was nine, and an earthquake started shaking our house, I knew immediately that my mother’s favorite vase would fall from the shelf and shatter against the antique iron at the base of the cabinet, into a thousand irreparable pieces. My dreams told me things to watch for, gave clues for me to follow. Most of them were relatively innocuous. An exploding house was another matter entirely.
“Come on… let’s go, Weirdo.” Millie said, pulling me down the sidewalk towards her house.

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