Thirty minutes later, I stood before a red metal box with four wheels.
It was red. Shiny. Unnervingly compact.
It’s a death trap.
“This is a car,” the magworm said helpfully, opening one of the doors. He had introduced himself as “Your father, Daniel, you know this, Sera” approximately four times on the way down the stairs. I had forgotten approximately four times. “You’ve been in one before. Many times.”
I did not respond.
I had seen these things called cars. From above. They looked like small, scurrying beetles, carrying their little occupants from one pointless destination to another.
I had never been inside one.
Now that I was standing next to one, I could see that my assessment had been… generous. A metal coffin on wheels. I had seen the aftermath of what these things did to human bodies. I love it and had laughed at the aftermath.
Now I was supposed to get inside one?!
“I will walk,” I announced.
“The hospital is twenty minutes away,” the messy-haired girl said without looking up from her glowing rectangle. She had been poking at it constantly since we left the house, her thumbs moving with the kind of mechanical efficiency that suggested years of practice.
“Then I will walk for twenty minutes.”
“It’s cold.”
“I have endured temperatures that would freeze your mortal blood solid, human!”
“It’s raining.”
I looked up.
It was, in fact, raining.
…Unfortunate.
She-Devil… I mean Mum—I was still struggling with that one—let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “Sera. Get in the car.”
“No. You do not command me. You pathetic peasant.”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Then you should have thought about that before you struck me with your footwear.”
A pause.
From the front seat, Your Dad, magworm—Daniel, I would remember eventually—made a strange choking sound that might have been a laugh he was trying very hard to swallow.
Mum’s eye twitched.
“Sweetheart,” she said slowly to the messy-haired girl. “Help your sister get in the car.”
The girl looked up from her rectangle. She looked at me. She looked at Mum. She sighed the sigh of someone who had been asked to perform an impossible task and had accepted it as her lot in life.
“Fine.”
She climbed out of the car, walked around to where I was standing, and—without a word—grabbed my arm and started pulling.
“What are you doing?!” I demanded, trying to plant my feet. “Unhand me, your worthless piece of mortal! You do not handle someone great as me”
“Yeah yeah.Whatever. The greatness who is shivering like a leaf. Now! Get in the car.”
“I said no!”
“Sera. Get. In. The. Car.”
“I will smite you!”
“You can’t even make a fireball.” She yanked harder. “Get in!”
“I am a celestial being! I do not—”
“Yah yah, celestial being who can’t even protect herself from the rain! Get in the damn car!”
We stood there, locked in a bizarre tug-of-war, while Your Dad watched from the driver’s seat with an expression of profound resignation and Mum rubbed her temples like she was trying to stave off a migraine.
“You know, Honey,” Your Dad said mildly. “We could just let her walk. It might be good for her.”
“She’ll get lost,” Mum said.
“She’s an adult.”
“She called us peasant, she-devil, you a.. whatever worm and demanded us to fetch her water. She’s not finding her way to a hospital.”
“Fair point.”
“She also forgot my name,” the messy-haired girl grunted, still pulling on my arm. “I’m her favourite sister.”
“You are her ONLY sister!! ” Both Mum and Your Dad said at the same time.
“That just means I win by default.”
The girl had resorted to shoving me from behind now, her shoulder planted against my back like she was trying to move a particularly stubborn piece of furniture. I stumbled forward, caught myself, and turned to glare at her.
“You are incredibly strong for a mortal so small,” I admitted.
“I carry art supplies.” She shoved again. “Heavy ones. Don’t mess with me. Now, Get in.”
“This is undignified.”
“So is standing in the rain arguing with my brain-damaged sister, but here we are.”
Brain-damaged. The audacity. The sheer—
Somehow—I’m still not entirely sure how—I ended up in the back seat.
The door slammed shut behind me.
I froze.
The space was small. Enclosed. Artificially scented like pine and something faintly sweet, like the remnants of a spilled drink. The windows were closed. The doors were closed. Everything was closed.
A trap.
The messy-haired girl climbed in beside me and immediately went back to her glowing rectangle, leaving me to sit rigidly upright, my hands gripping the edge of the seat.
The car made a rumbling noise.
I tensed.
We began to move.
“Relax,” the girl said without looking up. “You’ve done this a thousand times.”
I hadn’t. But she didn’t know that.
The car rolled forward, and I watched out the window as the house—a modest two-story building with white siding and a small patch of grass—receded behind us. Trees blurred past. Other cars. Buildings. Humans going about their small, meaningless lives.
Everything looked so… close.
So flat.
So small.
“The world is moving too fast,” I said.
“I’m going at the speed limit.” Your Dad said in a calm voice.
“No, I mean—everything is rushing past. Why is everything so close? Why can’t I see further? Why can’t I—”
I stopped.
Because I realized what was wrong.
I was used to seeing the world from above. From heights that made mountains look like pebbles and oceans like puddles. I could see everything. All of it. The whole tapestry of existence spread out beneath me like a painting I could step into.
Now I’m inside the painting.
Trapped between the brushstrokes.
“I do not feel well. I need to regurgitate whatever is inside me” I said.
“You’re fine. And it’s called puke. Not re..gur..gur, you are not feeding tiny birds.” the girl said without looking up.
“No, I am not—everything is moving and fast—”
The girl finally looked up from her rectangle. She studied my face for a long moment, something unreadable in her expression.
“You really did hit your head, huh?”
“I didn’t hit anything. I fell from the High Heavens after being banished by the Celestial Tribunal.”
“Uh huh.” The girl rolled her eyes.
“It’s true.”
“Sure it is.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small plastic-wrapped thing. “Here. Eat this.”
I took it warily. “What is it?”
“A granola bar.”
I turned it over in my hands. The wrapper was crinkly. There were words on it—ingredients, nutritional information, a little picture of oats and honey.
“I don’t know what this is.”
“It’s food. You eat it.”
“I know what food is.”
“Then eat it.”
I stared at the granola bar. I stared at the girl. She stared back, her expression a mixture of exasperation and something that might have been concern. Then, in a moment of pure, unadulterated panic, I popped the whole thing—wrapper and all—into my mouth.
The girl yelp of “NO!” erupted from her. What followed was less a wrestling match and more a mugging by a very tiny, very determined wildcat with nursing complex. She wrestled me to the seat, forced my mouth open like she was prying a stubborn clam that had personally offended her, and yanked the slobbery, plastic-wrapped brick of oats back out.
A note from B.R.LEE
💖💖 If you’re enjoying this story, please click on FOLLOW my page &/or RATE my story👍🏻 — as it really help stories and authors like myself to be discovered. 💝💝