The sentence we came up with is:
"It was raining when she fell down the well."
So hope you enjoy and do let me know what you think.
Smiles
Julia
It was raining when she fell down the well. I saw it all so clearly. The rain had caused the whole south pasture
to become a large puddle of impassable mud. We always kept the animals out of
that pasture during the winter. I wondered
at the time if she’d just gotten confused because she was running erratically though
that very pasture and it was dark and storming like crazy too.
At first I thought she was just in a damned hurry to get
back into the house, afraid of the weather same as she’d always been. But as the intermittent lightening lit her up
sporadically, I saw that her pace seemed frenzied, almost as if she was running
from something. When she finally got
close to the back yard, just about 10 yards from the well, she suddenly stopped
and turned around to look behind her. As
she turned back to continue quickly towards the house, another strike of lightening
lit up her whole figure, bringing her face into sharp relief. I drew back as if
I’d been physically struck. The expression
of horror and fear that I saw there, on that beautiful, oh so familiar face,
her full mouth contorted as she worked to let out a scream, will never leave me.
Whatever pursued her, she was obviously terrorized out of
her mind. It took no more than a few
moments for her to cover the rest of the gap between where she had stood and
where the well opened, a gaping hole in the ground that she must have known was
there. I swear, if I did not know
better, I would say that it looked almost as if she’d jumped into the well
instead of fallen. As she fell over the
large opening and vanished from sight, the sound of her shrill scream, finally
erupting from her like an unstoppable reverberation from her soul, pierced my
very being.
¤
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
I sat up in bed, drenched in sweat, and tried to get my
breath. My hand fumbled feebly at the
side table and finally settled on my inhaler.
I quickly took a couple puffs and tried to calm my breathing the way the
doctors had been telling me to since I was a very little girl. In and out.
In….and…out. My chest still
heaved in and out at a crazy heavy pace.
Years of practice and still the breathing techniques never worked after
one of my ‘dreams’. I’d lately found
that meditation was helpful in calming my breathing, so I’d been practicing
that on a regular basis. But this dream
had me so freaked out that I weakly debated going through the house to find my
cell phone and calling my sister phoebe.
I finally decided to try to get on top of it myself. After about twenty minutes, I was able to lay
back and rest on my pillows again, my breathing eased by the medicine and the
meditation. And then I did call
Phoebe. Because the woman I’d just ‘seen’
fall in the well, the same well that I’d grown up with my whole life, was me.
