The week's prompts were varied by individual...basically, we each wrote down a story idea and then drew them from a hat, allotting 30 minutes to write. Here's my prompt and story:
“You wake up in an unfamiliar environment and everyone’s telling you you’re someone else, with a completely different life.” ~Charissa
I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that seventh burrito before I went to sleep last night, but my cravings left me with little choice. I must be having another nightmare. Why else would these strange people be looking at me so quizzically and calling me Isaac?
“Isaac, for heaven’s sakes, are you feeling all right?” some strange rotund woman with a mole on her left cheek asks me with a glint of worry in her eyes. I wince at the throbbing in my head only a moment, looking around the room that smells like burnt popcorn. This woman and two twin boys that look vaguely familiar are staring down at me as though I were an alien abducted for their own purposes, to be dissected and studied. One of the twins, the shirtless one, nudges the other playfully.
“Isaac’s toasted!” he says, half-mocking, half-reverently.
Toasted? I don’t think so. But Isaac? Who’s that?
“Joey, go put your shirt on and get your books for school, you’re going to be late,” the woman—I can only assume it is their mother—says with a look that speaks volumes. She points to the mute one standing behind him. “You too, mister.”
“But ma!” Joey exclaims (aha! It IS his mother!). “It ain’t fair, how come Isaac’s the one who’s plastered and I’M the one always getting yelled at?” Joey throws his lanky arms up in the air in exasperation, while his twin just rolls his eyes.
The mother fairly spits out her words in a hiss, “We’ll talk about this later, boys. GO!”
Amazingly, the two twin boys shrug their shoulders, kiss her on the cheek, and rumble down the stairs. Stairs? We don’t have stairs here…
I clear my throat awkwardly, which this strange woman mistakes for a reproving cough and the next thing I know she’s slapping me across the face. “Isaac William Bronston, how DARE you bring your fiery potions and hangovers into this house! MY house! And with the boys here to see it! Oh, if your father weren’t going to tan your hide three times over, I’d do it myself!”
Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Tan MY hide? Was this crazy psychopath who smells like ham and wood talking to ME?
“I’m…sorry?” I offer stupidly, still rubbing the cobwebs of sleep from my mind.
“Sorry! Sorry? You don’t know what sorry IS yet, mister! But you will!”
Before she can raise her hand to strike me, I instinctively roll both arms in front of my face. “Who the heck is Isaac?” I manage to ask. By the way her face turns from tomato-red to deathly pale, I’m sure it’s the wrong question. But, slowly, she manages to breathe again and she lowers her hand, so maybe it was the right question after all.
“Isaac?” she asks me, drilling her eyes into mine like she was looking for a priceless gift she’d accidentally tossed away.
“Isaac…who?” I venture again.
“You, son.” Her voice is a raspy whisper, and even though I don’t know her from Eve, I can tell she’s going to start crying soon.
“I-I-I’m not Isaac!” I stammer, more panic lacing my voice than I intended. I struggle to sit up, the hardness of my muscles and the sudden wave of nausea that hits me throwing me for a loop. My voice, I notice, is remarkably deeper than when I went to sleep, but even so it rises with every syllable. “I—I’m Sophia! Sophia GRACE!”
Her eyes narrow at me, the love and worry gone, wrath slinking into its place. “Isaac, what are you ON? Who is this Sophia, is she…is she the reason…”
I blush at the very implication. “I’m NOT ISAAC, and I’m NOT ON anything!” Fully upright now, my eyes scour the room for any OUNCE of normalcy, a familiar book on a shelf, my little sister’s medications lining her desk, my poster of Johnny Depp, ANYTHING, but the place may as well be the moon for all the familiarity I’m finding here.
“I told you, lady, I’m NOT Isaac, I’m Sophia Grace, and if we’re going to keep having this strange conversation I really have to have a cup of coffee.” My calmness and my demanding of beverages at such a time surprises even me, even if this is a dream.
“Okay,” she agrees all-too-easily. “But, mark my words, mister, five minutes of coffee haven, and then we’re talking.”
I roll my eyes, thinking how like the mute twin I must look to her, and smile ruefully. “Whatever you say, ma’am. Now, coffee?”
Minutes pass by in silent agony as the java settles in and the panic I felt earlier starts to rise again. I’m a fifteen-year-old girl, why was I sleeping in a huge bed that belonged to someone named Isaac? Even worse, why did everyone insist on thinking I WAS Isaac? This just isn’t making any sense. I went to sleep like any other night (well, almost…I DID overeat…again…). I woke up only twice, which was no small feat for me. Once when Josie was into another coughing fit, and once when I knocked my shadowbox over onto my head…
My HEAD!
I hit my head, and I woke up a…man? How did that happen? And if I am Isaac, who is me?
