The Kingdom of Dreams | Teen Ink

The Kingdom of Dreams

April 27, 2010
By gollyitshannah PLATINUM, Woodbridge, Connecticut
gollyitshannah PLATINUM, Woodbridge, Connecticut
25 articles 6 photos 5 comments

Favorite Quote:
"So you want a heart? You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable"


The room was empty. Rich maple wood poles reached toward the sky, held tightly together by nothing. Together, they kept out the outside world, creating the walls. The black floor sparkled strangely; giving the illusion you could fall straight through it. The ceiling was made of a deep auburn liquid that swirled around itself, caught in a square shape, as if a force was keeping it from spilling onto the floor below. A very small, very cheap plywood door seemed out of place in this room, and also seemed to be slowly sliding into the ground.

This room was very old, and dust circled each other in an endless game of filling the empty room. Sadly for the dust, it could not seem to touch the ground and would just hang in the air, waiting until gravity would take over.
On the right side corners of the room was scarlet silk, the softest silk known to mankind. On the right side of the wall you could see small carvings of indistinct objects, fuzzy to the common eye. Then, away from the other carvings, on its own pole, was a beautiful butterfly.

The other side of the room was dirtier. In the corners were grimy silver tiles. The maple was a duller color than the other side, and dirt was wedged between the poles. There were fingerprints pressed into the wood, and small sketching of initials and hearts. One of the most readable was ‘UB loves IP’. And, squeezed onto the same pole was a verse from a poem.

Somewhere, far away, a bell chimed. The floor, from its sparkling black, turned into a stunning yellow. Suddenly, from the right wall, all but the one solitary carving threw butterflies and dragonflies free of their wooden prison, and they flew through the dust particles. You could almost hear the particles screaming as the bugs ate them, leaving the room sparkling clean.
Then, from the left wall, the initials let out strange, ghostly beings. Some held hands and skipped out of their names. They would kiss, and begin to mouth how much they loved each other. But others stomped out from their initials and began to scream at each other. Or, some ignored each other completely and tried to whisper to other images. Some initials did not give out any unearthly humans.
Suddenly, they all turned and stared at the UB and the IP initials. IP walked from his initials, his head high and his eyes cold. He walked up to an ugly man, and they began stare at each other, moving their lips silently. A woman behind the man tried to mouth to IP, but he waved her off angrily. She turned back to the UB and IP initials, and stared at the sketching. She put her hand to the clumsily written UB and began to sob quietly.
The ugly man and IP ignored her. Suddenly, the woman’s image began to fade. The man turned to her, and a shadow moved over his pale face. He bent down and touched her arm, but she became almost completely translucent. His hand fell through her, and she twisted in pain. The air wrapped its cold arms around her, and dragged her toward the yellow ground. The ugly man began to cry, hopelessly gripping the air she where she used to be. The ground, as soon as the woman was through it, turned back into the sparkling black.
A small auburn drop escaped its magical prison and fell toward the floor. As it hit the ground, a flood of black waves erupted and sprayed over the walls. The plywood door flew open, already halfway through the ground, and a ray of sunlight pierced the silent figures. They open their mouths, as if in a scream, and disappeared instantly. The bugs flashed their beautiful wings and escaped through the melting door. Then, the large carving of the beautiful butterfly cracked.
The ceiling spilled onto the floor, causing the floor to split open. Black and auburn waves covered the maple walls, dissolving the poles. The surf was about to consume the carving of the butterfly when a figure crawled through it, and it glided toward the sky, away from the swell.
In a yellow cornfield far away from civilization an invisible room fell through its own flooring. After the maple walls were gone, and the auburn ceiling was disintegrated, there was nothing left but a sparkling black deck and a half pole helplessly reaching toward the sky. On the pole was a poem that stated, “I love you today as I have from the start and I'll love you forever with all of my heart.”


The author's comments:
What inspired me to do this was several years ago, in English class, I read a story called, "There Will Come Soft Rains". I loved the idea of post-nuclear war, and I always wanted to make a story about it. That is where I got the idea for the room.
Then, I was reading an Ursula Le Guin book, and I got the idea of the surrealistic people and creatures.

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