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The Brueggen Stones

By Sarah Glover Byrd

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The Root Forest

Two heads with gray, curly hair popped up through the cosmetics counter like bagles out of a toaster, and two pairs of eyes stared at Lynn. She stood across the aisle, the keys to the watch display dangling from her hand, and stared back. These heads were smaller than the others. They had smoother skin and shorter curls too.
"Children's heads," Lynn announced under her breath and hid a yawn.
For several days, she had seen heads no one else could see, oversized heads with long, gray curls and eyes as big as tennis balls.
Lynn does not panic, she'd told herself.
The colorful light patterns she usually saw during migraine headaches had changed to heads; that was all. Her doctor called the light patterns auras. Auras preceded and sometimes accompanied classic migraine headaches.
This November Lynn's auras had taken the form of heads, and the heads currently in view, perching on top of cosmetics, belonged to children. She opened the watch display and put away a sterling silver watch. Then she locked the display case and glanced across the aisle again.
The smaller heads still had eyes the size of tennis balls. The shorter curls were still gray.
"Lynn does not panic," she stated out loud and smiled brightly at the customer who had paused to look at herself in the cosmetic counter's mirror.
The customer left in a hurry, and Lynn shrugged. The auras would leave soon too. Thanks to Imitrex, her migraines stayed mild and never lasted more than a few days.
The children's heads popped back down into the counter, and Lynn checked the department store clock. Five more minutes--she could sign out now; well, soon.
After she'd signed out, Lynn grabbed her coat in one hand and her shoulder bag in the other. Then she ran through the store. She always ran at the end of her shift, hurtling through the big glass door that led to downtown Chicago. A block away from the store, she would stop long enough to put on her coat. Then she'd run again.
Six months ago she had graduated from high school and taken the job in a large Chicago department store. Everyone in her family had argued against the decision, even Aunt Isabelle, who'd offered to share her apartment in the high-priced city. Lynn was bright; she should go to college, they'd all insisted.
"I am an adult," she had informed them, lifting her nose and sniffing at the inadequacy of their understanding. "I'm ready to earn my own living."
One week into her new job, she'd known better. Lynn wasn't a child anymore, but she wasn't an adult either. She was an in-between, and she ran after work to leave the store.
That evening, as she bounded outside onto the Chicago sidewalk, she slid on a wet spot and fell backwards. A pink light twirled past. At the same time, a bright blue light twisted from one side of her vision to the other. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again. Yellow, orange, and green lights were dancing around her now. The orange one had a tail.
She must have bumped her head and bumped it hard. Until her vision cleared, she should lie still, flat on her back. Lynn waits patiently, she instructed herself and closed her eyes for a full thirty seconds. Then she peeked out of one eye--good, no lights.
Lynn opened both eyes, planning to jump up and run the customary block; however, her eyes kept opening wider than necessary. In fact, they opened so wide they hurt.
Instead of high buildings hiding a Chicago sky, gray branches intertwined far over head, gray branches that couldn't possibly exist. She strained in the dim light to see car-crowded streets and people-crowded sidewalks, but no amount of eyestrain produced anything but gray tree trunks.
An engineer could have constructed a two-lane tunnel through any one of those trunks, but no car, not even a Chicago one used to darting in and out of tight spots, would have had anywhere to go. Gray roots as big as roadside pipes curled out of the mossy floor of the forest and tangled with each other before plunging back into the ground where they belonged.
Lynn sat up gradually, feeling as if someone had clicked a remote's slow motion at her. Her pupils dilated until they covered their blue irises.
She couldn't think clearly, but she could feel her hands doing something, so she stared down at them. Instead of a coat and shoulder bag, her hands clutched big fistfuls of moss. She stared at the moss. It was light gray, the same color as her slacks. She stared at her slacks. They had wrinkled badly.
Linen always wrinkled.
It was an ordinary fact.
One by one, she made her fingers relax until they gave up their efforts to uproot moss. Putting her hands in her lap, she straightened up. She still couldn't think, though. She couldn't even make Lynn statements.
In the forest distance, someone spoke. Someone else answered. Lynn listened to the voices with all the focus of a slow-motion mind. When the voices got louder and she began to hear the sharp crack of twigs snapping underfoot, the edges of her mouth curved instinctively downwards.
She didn't want to meet the owners of those voices. They talked an octave lower than anyone she'd ever heard, and they used odd guttural sounds in their words. The words themselves didn't make sense.
A foreign language. The thought, her first one since she'd opened her eyes in a gray forest, released her from slow motion.
Tangled tree roots formed a cave over on her right, and she crawled quickly toward the cave's mouth. The ground sloped down under her root cave, and she scrambled through the darkness toward its lowest, most hidden part, wincing as her knees bumped over small rocks.
A single ray of sunlight, somehow bypassing all the branches and roots in its way, flickered inside that low place. Lynn crawled to one side of the flickering light and stopped, but she had to push a few rocks out of her way before she could sit comfortably.
One of the rocks rolled into the flicker of light and sparkled turquoise...

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