Red
I live on the beach and frequently watch the sailboats fight with the same wind that whips my hair into my face. That same wind carries grains of sand away with every step taken by humanity. And the same wind upsets the hoop which I try to balance at my waist.
Today in school, we studied gravity. Feeling the spin of the hoop at my waist, I fight this wind as my gaze drinks in the churning ocean. I love the subject of gravity. It’s so mysterious. You can’t see it but only have to jump to feel its force. Or engage in a solitary tug-of-war while trying to control a toy that’s spinning around your waist.
A gush sent the hoop out of kilter and forced me to overcorrect which ended my control over it. Laughing, I picked it up and headed inside to clean up. At the time, I had no idea that I would witness an interruption in this awesome force we know as gravity.
When I went inside, my mother called out and asked if I had my homework finished. I told her I’d done it at school. Of course, she asked to review it. I hadn’t lied about doing my homework. I had developed a habit of leaving my finished work at school. That way, I wouldn’t forget and leave it at home.
After telling her, she launched into the same lecture as always, “How am I supposed to trust that it’s done if I don’t see it?”
“Mom…I did it. I have an A in most of my classes.”
“Your math grade must come up. You have to bring your homework for me to see, Lindsey. You’re a smart girl. Why can’t you remember it?”
I muttered an apology and kissed her cheek before she opened the front door. She worked at the local hospital as a nurse and had just been called in for work. My dad had been repairing something on our sailboat out back but entered just as she was leaving.
I asked if I could still have my friend over. My parents normally allowed me to sleep over a friends or vice-versa on the weekends. My father nodded, “Your mother’s only going in for a few hours. We’ll be cooking out later, okay?”
I eagerly nodded and grabbed a drink from the fridge. Then I called to tell Brittany she was allowed to stay. She let me know that she’d be at my place shortly. After kissing my father’s cheek, I headed toward the backdoor and asked, “Are you taking the boat out today?”
“No. I’m waiting for a part.”
Knowing he missed sailing, I nodded and told him to yell when Brittany pulled up. He gave me a thumbs-up. I set off across the sand with a book and my drink in hand. I needed to kill some time until she arrived. A faint crackling sound caught my attention as I spread my towel out.
I stood back up and froze with a frown on my place. Normally a constant presence, the ocean breeze had vanished. I had lived on the ocean my entire life and had never felt something so weird in my life. I glanced at the sky and, by the time I lowered my gaze once again, a gust of wind blasted sand at me. Grabbing the towel, I backtracked into the house once again to find my father.
I found him in the kitchen and asked him, “Dad, have you ever felt the wind completely die before blasting you in the face with sand?”
He cocked an eyebrow, “Yeah but rarely here.”
I pointed out back toward the ocean. “It just happened.” Since he was looking at me as if I’d gone crazy, I insisted, “Seriously, it felt really strange. It was like time stopped or something.”
He barked a laugh, “I wish.”
Always complaining that there wasn’t enough time in the day, my father peered out the window before shrugging, “It’s a clear day, Lindsey.” He pointed at the steaks on the counter. “Can you help me bring this out onto the deck?”
I quickly transferred the platter to the table outside. Hearing a horn’s beep, I told him, “That must be Brittany.”
I hurried down the steps and around the house to the driveway to meet her. She was pulling a tote out of the car. I waited until she kissed her mom goodbye. With a wiggle of my fingers at her mother, I motioned for her to follow me around back. After settling her things in my room and helping my dad transfer items to the back deck, we grabbed some things and headed to the water’s edge.
I’d forgotten all about the wind dying down event from earlier. She started talking about the latest stolen glances from her newest crush. She always had a crush on different boys every week. We sank onto a towel, giggling over one of her stories, until she frowned, “It smells like it’s going to storm and…yuck!”
I distractedly nodded and then looked up at the sky. “Ozone and…rotten eggs?”
She wrinkled her nose and raised a hand to her mouth. “That smells like sulfur.” I could tell by her voice that she was on the verge of dry heaving.
We looked around. Numerous people along the beach were doing the same and they had bewildered expressions. Just as quickly as the odor had appeared, it vanished as if wind blew it away. Only the wind had died again.
My eyes widened. I told her about the earlier experience. When the rotten egg odor swiftly reappeared, both of us had to struggle to breath. We covered our mouths but the smell seemed to ooze into our pores.
We ran back to the house and stumbled inside before gasping for breath. I called to my dad, “I don’t know what’s going on but something stinks out there.”
Brittany spoke up, “It smells like sulfur.”
My father frowned, “Sulfur?”
We nodded as he moved toward the door. Sticking his head out, he took a long inhale. When he glanced back at us, I could tell he was about to say everything was normal. With a shake of his head, he proved me right. “Smells like an ocean breeze to me.”
The smell had been so strong and others had obviously smelled it, so we had to make sure by sticking our heads out too. After confirming this, Brittany and I could only shrug. We followed him back outside as he twirled the spatula that he’d just cleaned. No more than ten minutes passed when it happened again. This time, my father growled, “Oh…God! What is that?”
We frantically nodded as he pointed to the house, “Come on. Let’s take this food back inside. There’s no way we can eat around this stench.”
We helped him carry everything back indoors while expressing bafflement when the odor once again disappeared. Settling around the table, we ate while discussing what could be causing the foulness. Afterward, Brittany and I cleaned up and went to watch a movie.
The rest of the evening was uneventful. My mother came home from work while we were in the living room giggling over stuff that happened at school. She asked if we’d watched a favorite reality show. Since we’d forgotten it, everyone settled down to watch. Those were the highlights of our first evening.
The next morning, I asked my mother over coffee if she’d smelled anything odd the previous day. She shook her head so I dropped it. Once breakfast was finished, Brittany and I hit the beach. We didn’t detect the stench while taking a walk. By the time we came back inside, it was lunchtime.
Brittany asked if she could look at our sailboat so we headed that way. It was a shame that my father couldn’t sail, seeing as there was only one boat out on the water. Grabbing the hoops and my iPod, we asked my father what was wrong with his sailboat. He showed us a few items that needed replacing and mentioned again that he was waiting on a part before he could continue.
While we were listening, the strange crackling I had heard from the day before hit the air. The three of us paused, looked around for the source, but everything appeared perfectly normal. For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I grew nervous. The sound seemed to be everywhere at once. I told them, “This happened before the sulfur smell yesterday.”
“Well, let’s hope that smell doesn’t return today. We’ll have to watch the news later. Maybe that will give us a hint at what’s going on.”
With cleaning tools in hand, my father shooed us away from the sailboat. Carrying our large plastic hoops and my iPod, we went down to the beach. I put some music on so we could compete to see who could keep the hoop going the longest. Brittany was pretty good but was unused to the wind creating that vicious wobble.
Giggling, I accused her of cheating because she wore a long skirt with a flare at the bottom. That extra material kept her hoop from hitting the sand faster than mine. As people started wandering onto the beach, we made a game of walking while maintaining the hoop at various places. A couple of times, we slung them into the water and had to run after them.
We were having so much fun until a horrendous boom caused everyone along the beach to scream and tumble to the sand. The air seemed to shake and waver as the wind died and an even stronger sulfur odor returned.
Everyone’s hands flew to their nose and mouth while stumbling toward homes. We hadn’t been inside for more than twenty minutes when my father called for us to come closer to the bank of windows that lined the back of our house. When we stopped beside him, he pointed to a lone sailboat and said, “Keep watching.”
Staring at where he was pointing, both of us gasped when a wall of fog pushed forward. Brittany slapped my arm and shrieked, “Its…pink.”
“Dad, what is it!?”
He shook his head as my mother stopped beside us. “I don’t know either but I think we should get away from the windows.”
The worry in her voice made Brittany and I back slowly toward the middle of the room. That night, we discussed every possibility and searched news channels for information. There was nothing about it on the news. Surely we weren’t the only ones to see it. We were completely baffled. It was as if the booming, air-shaking, and sulfur smells hadn’t happened at all.
Flabbergasted, Brittany and I whispered in the dark after we settled into our beds. We finally drifted off to sleep sometime after midnight. The next day, I teased Brittany about wearing the skirt. She shrugged and pulled another lengthy garment out of her bag.
After convincing my mother that whatever happened must not have been that important since it wasn’t on the news, we went onto the beach again to play. The same lone sailboat from yesterday was out today. There weren’t many people on the beach so we took a walk.
We hadn’t moved that far away from the house when we detected a faint whining sound. Looking all about, we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from but the sand shivered and shifted beneath our feet.
Brittany grabbed my arm and pulled me down to the sand. “Lindsey, are they launching a rocket nearby again? Maybe that’s what’s causing all this.”
I hadn’t heard anything about a launch on the news so I shrugged. That’s when we noticed the vast march of crabs and insects scrambling in every direction. Shrieking at the sight, we kicked sand all around us in our haste to get away from the tiny creatures. I had never moved so fast in loose hot sand in my life. My father saw us running and called out, “What’s wrong?”
“You didn’t hear it?” He shook his head while slowly approaching us. In that moment, I would have thought I was going crazy. Only Brittany had seen it too. I muttered, “What is going on?”
We told my father what we’d seen and heard. He went in search but quickly returned to tell us he’d found no scary crabs or freaked out insects. Frustrated now, I grabbed our hoops and rolled my eyes. “Let me change and we’ll compete again.”
I found an ankle-length bathing suit cover similar to Brittany’s and changed before we headed back out. Since no one was on the beach, we set the iPod up and launched into a dance competition. Trying to top her moves proved hard because she’d been in dance classes since she was eight.
I swiftly lost several rounds and urged her to teach me some of her moves. We became so engrossed that we didn’t detect the ocean slowly receding. Singing along with the lyrics, I glanced at Brittany just as everything turned a vivid shade of red.
The hoop froze in mid-air around her thighs. Horrified and fascinated at the same time, I reached out to her. She seemed way too still. My father’s sharp NO! drew my attention. He was running toward us. The crackling sounded again. This time, I felt the sand vibrating violently underneath our feet.
My father scooped me up and ran toward the house. The sulfur odor drenched the air and a piercing whine flooded our ears. My teeth felt as though they’d vibrate out of my skull. My friend hadn’t moved an inch. I had no idea that I was screaming Brittany’s name until we crossed the threshold.
My mother pulled me to her as my father slammed the door. I watched the water rise in a colossal wave. Brittany was locked in a frozen stance with the hoop still hung around her thighs.
“What’s happening!?”
Both my parents shook their heads and gaped. My father pointed toward the sky which caused my mother to stumble backwards. The boiling clouds parted for a huge ship that couldn’t be of this planet.
I didn’t even recognize my own voice as I asked, “Is it aliens?”
Neither of them had an answer. We ducked down as the massive ship hovered, shaking our entire house. Sand sprayed everything in sight as the giant ship moved above Brittany. I pulled at my father’s arm and cried as the craft stop directly above my friend. The three of us shrieked when the hoop around her thighs shivered.
As if an invisible hand reached out of the gigantic vessel, the hoop slowly lifted off Brittany. It didn’t stop until the hoop winked out of existence above her head. Slowly, the odd aircraft moved away in the same direction from which it had arrived. A huge boom rocked the house as it shot off into the clouds.
My father threw my mother and I to the ground moments before the windows in our house shattered inward. Laying there for a stunned second, I breathed in panic, “Brittany! Did they take Brittany?!”
My mother pushed herself up from the floor. Glass glinted in her hair and fell back to the floor. She peeked out the shattered window and her eyes widened. As if in a trance, she stood and walked to the door.
“NO!” Instead of slowing her down, my father’s sharp command seemed to spur her forward. She flung the door open. Brittany swayed on the other side before collapsing across the threshold.
Mindless of the glass cutting my knees and palms, I crawled over to my friend. With grains of sand imbedded along her body, she looked sunburned. I shrieked, “Oh my God, Brittany! Are you okay!?!”
Staring at me, she muttered, “Hip hoop.”
Shaking my head, I asked, “What!?”
She repeated it again before shaking her head as if clearing her thoughts. Blinking furiously, she finally focused on me. A roaring filled the air. Assuming it was the ship’s return, everyone’s gaze flew to the open doorway.
To our horror, a wall of water was headed toward the house. I grabbed for Brittany but my father’s hand closed over my wrist. My mother almost tackled Brittany and we fled up the stairs. Screaming in sheer terror, we ran as fast as we could up the steps but only made it to the landing before the house was wrenched off the pillars which it sat atop.
We clung to the stair railing as the house groaned around us. Pushing me from behind, my father screamed, “UP! Keep climbing up.”
We scrambled up the stairs, stumbling as the water tore its way into our home. By the time we reached the roof, the house was bobbing in the ocean. My father frantically asked Brittany, “What was that?”
She shrugged, “They wanted to hip hop.” Shaking her head with a scowl, she corrected herself, “They wanted the hip hoop.”
“Why?”
She shrugged again, “I don’t know.”
We huddled there until my father spotted an Air Force rescue helicopter. Waving his arms in the air, he alerted them of our location. We watched as our rescuer expertly shimmied down a rope.
It took a while for them to transport us to shore. When we were all gathered, Brittany pointed to the sky. Looking up with hands shielding our eyes, we all gasped when we spotted a twin version of the hoop materialize in the sky. Like some portal to another world, the inner part of the circle pulsed.
All around us, tiny particles of sand slowly started to rise. With widening eyes, everyone stumbled off the sand as it swirled into the air and headed toward the hoop. The whining was back and, along with it, a beam of vivid red blasted from what I could only assume was just that…a portal to another world.
Before our very eyes, the sand melted to form a splendid glass ladder. Brittany nodded and a huge smile spread over her face. Like some old late night move I’d once seen, she softly said, “They’re here.”
~~ The End ~~
