Misadventures in Fiction: The Tunnel in the Back Yard

Now that my 13-year-old has acquired the bug for fiction writing from my wife, we've taken to participating in a complete-the-story exercise as a family. This is a tough assignment for me, as fiction writing is not my strength. I'm good at nonfiction. Making stuff up? Not so much. But I decided to give it a try anyway. 

The story prompt came from And Then..., an activity box that offers 20 different story-starter cards. It's designed for kids, and we bought it more or less for our homeschooling purposes. But anyone interested in writing a story might find using its prompts a fun exercise. 

After thinking too much about where to post this, I decided I might as well just put it here on my blog. The story prompt makes up the first few sentences, and the tale spins out from there. It takes a while to get going because I literally made it up as I went, with no clue what the point of the story should be or how it should end. Once I had the story idea in place, I could have gone back and tightened things up. But I thought I might as well leave it as is. 

The Chair

One

“Can you come over after dinner?” Lesley asked on the phone. “It’s really important. I have to show you something you’re never going to believe.”

“Sure thing,” I said. And I rushed through my plate of spaghetti, because Lesley is always great for adventures.

I walked across the street and knocked on the door. Lesley answered, breathless, and pulled me by the arm, through the house, out the back door, and into the yard. When we reached the lilac bushes at the edge of the yard, we got onto our hands and knees and pushed through the low branches. I got blasted with the smell of all the flowers and started sneezing. Stupid allergies.

Lesley pushed aside a board, and a tunnel appeared in the ground, with light shining out and steps leading down.

I looked down. “What the heck?”

“Come on!” Lesley said, hopping in. So I followed, even though, now that I saw it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. At the very least, I should have changed out of my school clothes and into something more suited for, well, dirt. But it was too late for that now. I’d just have to listen to Mom telling me I should have changed out of my nice clothes first. Lesley always thinks I overdress for school, with my ironed button-downs and my pleated pants. But that’s just how I like to express myself. I’m as neat and planned as she is a go-with-the-flow kind of person. I actually like that about her. It’s just not my way of doing things.   

With my clean-for-the-moment Hush Puppies, I put my weight down on the first step. It creaked and wiggled under my feet. Yeesh. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

I stood there for a minute trying to get my footing. Then I looked back up to see the inviting safety of Lesley’s back yard, still lit up by the early evening summer sun. Maybe we could just hang out and play catch or something.

But no, that wasn’t going to happen, because Lesley was already at the bottom of the stairs. She would have disappeared into the tunnel without me, except she obviously realized I wasn’t right behind her. She looked up at me and started waving me down impatiently.

“C’mon, Ding-Dong. What are you waiting for?”

Ugh. I hate when she calls me that. But I can’t just stand up here and let her think I’m scared to go where some girl marches in without a care.

“Oh, uh, nothing,” I lied. “I’m right behind you.”

“Clearly, you’re not. Now come on.” And she vanished into the tunnel.

I gingerly stepped on each wooden board on my way down, certain I was going to tumble to my death. Why again did I agree to this? I didn’t even want to be down there. It smelled like dirt and mold. I swell up like a balloon if I touch mold. Lesley knows this. And it was probably crawling with centipedes down here. I hate centipedes.

But not Lesley. She catches bugs and puts them in a jar and tries to make pets out of them. It’s always been like this with us. We’re the same age. Well, more or less. She’s five weeks and five days older. But the point is, we grew up together, right across the street from each other, and she’s always been the one who loves doing typical “boy” stuff like digging for worms and hitting tin cans with slingshots. And wrestling. Ugh. She always moves faster than me and knocks me off my feet and pins me down before I even know what’s going on. It’s so embarrassing.

Me? I’d rather be inside reading a book. Or watching old Star Trek reruns. I actually got Lesley watching them with me, mostly because she likes laughing at the bad, outdated special effects. Still, she’d understand what I meant if I told her I felt like a redshirt right now, heading off to my doom in some dank underground cavern filled with hostile aliens. Then she’d laugh at me and tell me I’m being ridiculous while she marched off into the unknown, all guns blazing, like Captain Kirk. 

Overall, she’s pretty cool for a girl. And, like I said, always good for an adventure.

I finally got to the bottom stair. With my eyes squeezed shut, I took a leap of faith down onto the dirt, certain that I was going to fall through some kind of trap door and into a bottomless pit, swallowed up by the earth and never to be seen again.

When I eased open my eyes, I saw Lesley, maybe fifty feet down the tunnel. She was looking back at me with her arms folded and her foot tapping impatiently.

“Can we do this today?” she asked.

“Shut up,” I grumbled. When I caught up to her, her frown turned into a smile and she grabbed me by the arm.

“Come on! It’s so cool!” She tugged on my arm and led me deeper and deeper into this weird tunnel.

I looked around and saw nothing but dirt and rocks and roots, above us and below us. This wasn’t some old abandoned sewer pipe or anything like that. It was just a big dirt hole in the ground. Maybe five feet tall. I didn’t have to duck, but there also wasn’t a whole lot of headroom either. Obviously, someone, or something, dug this thing out by hand. But why? And where was the light coming from? I could feel that the tunnel was on a slight decline. We were definitely going deeper into the earth, and farther away from the light on the surface.

This was really weird. And seriously nerve-racking.

I was pretty sure I was going to die.

Two

“So how did you find this place?” I asked as I hoofed along behind Lesley.

“Max was digging around in Mom’s flower bed,” she said.

Max was Lesley’s dog. I like Max. He’s a good boy. I don’t know what breed he is. I don’t think Lesley knows either. He just showed up one day at her house and decided to hang around and never left. No one ever claimed him, so Lesley’s family kept him.

I can’t have dogs. Mom’s too worried that it’ll trigger some previously undiscovered allergy in me and I’ll get sick. But I play with Max almost every day and it’s fine. I wish Mom didn’t feel like she had worry about stuff so much.

Anyway, Max likes to do pretty much three things: eat, play fetch, and dig stuff. So I’m not surprised he was the one who found this thing.

“Has Max been down here?” I asked.

“No,” she shrugged. “For some reason he won’t come.”

Max might be the smartest one out of all of us. I was thinking we must be a hundred feet underground. And I still didn’t see the end.

All of a sudden, the tunnel made a sharp turn to the left. Lesley looked back at me and smiled. “We’re almost there!” she said. “Come on!” For the first time since I’d stepped down into the tunnel, she let go of my arm. She took off running and vanished around the corner.

“Wait!” I called out. I didn’t want to be in this creepy place alone. But Lesley wasn’t slowing down. I could hear her sneakers pounding against the dirt up ahead of me. So I picked up the pace.

This last section of the tunnel, if it actually was the last section, got a lot steeper and a whole lot narrower. And the ground got a lot rougher, too. It was like someone got tired of cutting the nice big hole into the earth and started to do the bare minimum just to get to the end. I didn’t like this. My claustrophobia was starting to kick in.

“Lesley?”

Dang it. Why did she have to be like this? Always Miss Danger and Adventure. Why can’t we just do something safe once in a while?

I started to feel dizzy. It felt like the walls were closing in on me. As I reached out to the wall to steady myself, I tripped and landed hard on my knees.

“Ow! Lesley, where are you?”

I wasn’t hurt. At least I didn’t think so. But when I got up and looked behind me, I saw what it was that knocked me off my feet. A big rock had apparently worked itself loose when I stepped on it. There were so many rocks and roots on the ground down in this part of the tunnel. Somebody should put up a warning sign or something. But of course, that would mean that people actually come down here, and no one in his right mind would actually do that.

I brushed myself off and carefully walked down, struggling not to lose my footing as the ground got more uneven and the angle got even steeper. Even worse, now I had to duck because the ceiling was getting lower.

“This had better not be one of your stupid pranks, Lesley,” I called out.

I started thinking about that time she stuck a frog in my backpack and it jumped out at me when I sat down at my desk. The whole class laughed at me when I screamed. I was so embarrassed. To her credit, Lesley felt bad about it and apologized to me at recess. That’s how she is. She isn’t mean. It’s just that sometimes she doesn’t think. But then she tells me I think too much. Maybe she’s right. All I knew was at this point, I was fully expecting her to be hiding around the next corner to yell boo at me and make me pee my pants. And then we’d have to walk all the way back up this stupid dirty tunnel, and for the next three months she’d go around telling everyone how she got me to go down into a hole in the ground just so she could jump-scare me. She literally would do that.

The tunnel got even shorter and narrower. Now I had to crouch to keep going.

“Lesley, this isn’t funny anymore,” I said. “C’mon, let’s go back.”

No answer.

The tunnel made another turn, this time to the right.

“Lesley? Lesley, why aren’t you answering me?”

Just then, I saw a huge root sticking out of the ground a few feet ahead of me. Next to the root was one of Lesley’s sneakers.

I panicked. “Lesley? Are you OK? Can you hear me?”

I grabbed her shoe and scooted down the hole as fast as I could. The tunnel made another turn. Around the corner, I saw Lesley, face down on the ground.

Three

“Oh, no! Lesley!”

The tunnel was steep enough that I was able to slide down to where she was lying. Her head was resting next to a big rock sticking out of the ground. Her Chicago Cubs baseball cap was sitting upside-down on the ground a few feet ahead of us. She must have tripped and slid down the hole until her head hit the rock.

I hurried and flipped her over. Her nice white T-shirt was covered in dirt. But worse than that, her left leg was skinned up pretty bad, from her knee up to where her cut-off jeans ended.

“Hey,” she said, blinking her eyes like she was just waking up. She looked up at me and smiled as if nothing was wrong.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I caught my foot on a stupid root back there.”

“I know. I found your shoe,” I said, gesturing to my hand.

“Thanks,” she said, taking it from me. But as she went to sit up, she dropped the shoe and grabbed her head. “Ow!”

“You might have a concussion, Lesley. We should get you back up to the surface. And look at your leg! If we don’t get that cleaned out, it could get infected.”

My mom’s a nurse. That’s why I know all this stuff. She’s always fussing over me or cleaning off some body part with alcohol as a precaution. If I get so much as a sniffle, she sticks a thermometer under my tongue and sends me to bed with a bowl of chicken soup. Lesley says my mom has made me neurotic. But I didn’t think I was being neurotic here deep under the ground. Lesley’s cool. She’s my best friend. She drives me crazy, and yes, she’s a girl. But she’s still my best friend. At least I think of her that way. She probably doesn’t think about me that way. But that doesn’t really matter. More than anything, I just don’t want her to get hurt.

I don’t want anybody to get hurt. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll be OK.”

“But… at least let me try to clean out your scrape,” I said, looking down at her bloody, dirty leg.

“With what?” she said. “There’s nothing down here. It’ll just have to wait.”

“But Lesley!”

Suddenly, she took my head in her hands and turned me to look at her.

“Hey! Relax, Ding-Dong. When we get there, I can ask it if I’ll be OK. Will that make you feel better?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just come with me. Do you trust me?”

“Should I?”

She laughed. And then she did something totally unexpected. She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

“It’s really sweet that you care,” she said. “Now go get my hat while I put my shoe on.”

Four

As I squirmed past Lesley and picked up her hat, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she kissed me. She actually kissed me! That was gross. But also… kind of nice. My stomach was doing all kinds of flippy-floppy things all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what that meant.

But I’d have to figure that out later, because she snatched her hat out of my hands, stuck it backwards on her head like she always did, and told me to come on as she started crawling further down the hole. I had to start crawling on all fours now, too. I couldn’t stand up at all at this point.

“I thought you said we were almost there!” I said as the tunnel started snaking back and forth and got smaller and smaller – and steeper and steeper.

“We are!”

Pretty soon, I was no longer even on my knees. I was marine-crawling, because there wasn’t room to do anything else. I started thinking about all those stories about people who go spelunking and make a wrong turn and get trapped in a skinny little tube and die.

My heart was pounding so hard.

“I don’t want to do this anymore, Lesley.”

“Almost there.”

“You said that ten minutes ago!”

Just then, she disappeared.

“Lesley?”

“We’re here!”

“Where’s here?”

“Just keep going. You’ll see me.”

I squeezed ahead, through an opening without an inch to spare. Then I felt a cool breeze on my face. I saw light, but nothing else.

“Down here!”

I looked down and saw Lesley waving at me. The ground had to be ten feet below me.

“That’s a long jump,” I gulped.

“Oh, come on!” she said. “I’m bleeding and I might have a concussion, and I made it down here all by myself.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” I mumbled.

She laughed. “OK, look to your left. There’s a little handhold there in the rock. Grab on to it and you can swing yourself down.”

I saw what she was talking about and wiggled my way out of the tube. I grabbed the little rocky outcropping, said a little prayer, and let myself drop.

“Ow,” I said, hitting the ground, more as a complaint than anything else.

Lesley clapped me hard on the shoulder. “See? You made it!”

“OK, but how do we get back up?” I looked back up at the hole that dropped us down here, feeling helpless and pretty anxious.

“I’ll show you. Don’t worry.”

Boy, it must be nice to be so fearless.

I looked around. We were inside a giant cavern. The slightest scrape of our feet echoed like a gong off the stone walls. I looked up and couldn’t even see the top. We must have been hundreds of feet underground. Thousands, maybe. And yet it was still as bright as day. It was like that scene in National Treasure when everything lights up underground and you see all the amazing things that had been safely hidden away for all those years.  

“Where’s the light coming from?” I asked, walking around to try to get my bearings.

Suddenly, Lesley grabbed me hard by the arm and yanked me backward.

“Down there, Ding-Dong,” she said, pointing to a deep chasm that I’d almost stepped off into. Imagine coming all this way and then plummeting to my death because I wasn’t watching where I was walking.

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“What are friends for? Come on!”

I looked down, mesmerized, into the illuminated hole, only to look up and see Lesley way over on the other side of the opening, easily a hundred feet away. Did I mention this hole was huge?

“What are you doing over there?” I called out.

“Showing you the way down! Come on!”

I made my way over to where she was standing. She looked at me with a smile. “Going down?” she said with a grand gesture of her hands.

I gulped. She rolled her eyes at me and sighed.

“Fine. I’ll go first.”

She stepped out onto a little stone step. The first of many, many steps. Little winding narrow steps that somebody had carved into the side of the rock probably ten million years ago. Steps that could so very easily crumble under my weight, like the ancient steps in the Mines of Moria. Steps that were so small and so steep, with no railing of any kind, that one misplaced footfall would send me plummeting to my death, like the Redshirt that I was clearly now doomed to be.

I couldn’t even see the bottom. All I saw was the bright light blaring up at us like some kind of subterranean sun. At this point, I was starting to think maybe it was the light shining out from the fires in the pits of hell. We were probably deep enough by this point.

I kept my eyes focused on Lesley’s feet ahead of me all the way down. If I just did what she did, maybe I wouldn’t die. Maybe.

I don’t know how long it took to get to the bottom, but it felt like an hour had gone by. I stepped off the final step with a sigh of relief and saw that we were standing on a flat, rounded stone surface.

“Well, here it is!” Lesley said.

“Here is what?”

“The way to the Chair!”

“What chair?”

She huffed at me and pointed. “Do you see the light, Ding-Dong?”

“Yes, of course I do.” The bright light that had illuminated the tunnel all the way down from the surface was emanating from beyond an archway off to the right.

“Then follow me,” she said, grabbing my arm.

We walked through the opening and were blasted by the full force of the light. I felt like my eyes were being stabbed with knives. I squeezed them shut, but it was still as if they were wide open.

“The light hurts!” I said.

“Just keep going!” she said. “It’ll be gone in a minute.”

“Gone?” What do you—”

Just then, the light vanished. It was no longer piercing through my eyelids. I opened my eyes and looked around. Confused, I looked behind us. This was nothing like what I was looking at, or trying not to look at, just five seconds ago. We were standing in the middle of some kind of… well, it looked like a little tropical glade. Like an oasis, a little clearing in the jungle or something. But how? How did this exist at the bottom of a hole in the ground?

I had so many questions.

Five

“Where are we?” I asked, more to myself than to Lesley. I heard birds chirping and leaves rustling all around us. In the distance, I could hear water running – maybe a river; maybe a waterfall. A cool breeze blew across my face. And overhead, I could feel the warmth of the sun. Or at least a sun, because I was starting to think we weren’t even on Earth anymore.

“I don’t know where we are,” Lesley said. “But isn’t it amazing?”

“It’s like we stepped through that bright light into another dimension or something,” I said. “It’s like those stories you hear about people dying and they tell you to go toward the light.” I thought about that for a minute. “Are we dead?”

Lesley laughed. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t heaven, if that’s what you mean. But who knows? Maybe it is.”

“But where did the bright light go?”

“I have no idea. All I know is you can’t see it from in here.”

But how can that be?

As I was standing there overthinking everything, a sudden rustling sound above my head startled me. I looked up just in time to see a monkey swinging on a vine from one tree to another, passing right over my head as he went on his way.

This was absolutely crazy.

“So where do you think this all came from?” I asked. “I mean, how did it get here?”

Lesley shrugged. “Maybe some crazy old scientist built it, decided it was more trouble than it was worth, and abandoned it. Who knows?”

“Trouble? What do you mean?”

“You know, it’s a good thing you have a head full of questions, because the Chair can tell you anything. Come on. I think you’re going to really like it.”

Lesley reached out for me to lead me on, only this time she didn’t grab my arm. She clasped her hand around mine. I looked down at our joined hands, then up at her. She just gave me a sweet smile and kept walking.

OK, this hand-holding thing was even weirder than monkeys swinging on vines over my head. But it felt kind of nice, too. A lot like that kiss on the cheek. My stomach was doing those weird little flip-flops again.

We walked deeper and deeper into the jungle. The running water I heard when we first got here kept getting louder, until we came to another clearing. I looked down to see we were standing on the brink of a deep blue lagoon. On the other side was a towering waterfall cascading down off a steep mountainside. So that was what I’d been hearing.  

Lesley tugged on my hand and led me to a little land bridge that took us over the lagoon and on to a rocky path toward the falls. As we got closer, I could see that there was a cave behind the curtain of water.

“Let me guess,” I shouted over the waterfall. “We’re going in there.”

“You guessed right.”

I looked up at the falls. The water was gushing down from hundreds of feet over our heads. I was already getting wet from the mist, but now we were going to have to run right through the falls and get soaked to the bone. I wasn’t sure I liked that, but there was no turning back now.

“Ready?” she said.

“No.”

“Too bad. Here we go.”

Before I could brace myself for it, Lesley tugged on my hand and we crashed through the wall of water. I gasped. She squealed with excitement. Because of course she did. One good thing, I guess, was that the water cleaned out the scrape on her leg.

And there we stood inside a big cave with smooth obsidian walls. I expected to be shivering from getting drenched, but I felt strangely… warm. I couldn’t really put my finger on why. But really, why should I have been questioning anything at that point? I was wandering around in an alternate-reality jungle that we got to from climbing down a hole, practically to the center of the earth, from Lesley’s back yard. If there was any day to expect the unexpected, this was definitely the one.

“Come on,” Lesley said, and tugged me along yet again.

When the heck were we finally going to get there?

Six

The sound of the waterfall got more and more faint the deeper we went into the cave. We kept going and going, zigging and zagging around big smooth slabs of rock. It was like walking through a maze. And the light from outside the cave was all gone now. It was pitch black. I couldn’t even see my own hands and feet, let alone Lesley’s.

“Lesley, how do you know where you’re going?”

“Because I’ve been down here before.”

“How many times?”

“Enough.”

“But how did you even get through this maze in the first place?”

“The monkey.”

“Wait. What?”

“He led me here.”

“You mean the one that was swinging over my head?”

“Have you noticed any other monkey since we got here?”

I had to admit I hadn’t.

“And before you ask,” Lesley said, “I don’t know what the monkey has to do with any of this. He just leads me here, and then he disappears into the dark.”

“But he’s not here now.”

“Yes, he is. He’s right in front of me.”

“What? I never saw him come into the cave.”

“Well, I guess you weren’t looking.”

OK, maybe Lesley was pulling some kind of elaborate prank on me. I don’t know how she could possibly pull off something this elaborate, but I wouldn’t put it past her. I mean, now she was trying to gaslight me about a monkey that I knew wasn’t there…

Until I saw him.

After walking for what seemed like a mile into the cave, we turned a corner that opened into a massive black room. It was completely empty, except for a little white box in the center. There was a light coming out of the box, which is why I could see the layout of the room. I could also see Lesley standing next to me. And in front of her, sure enough, was that stupid monkey.

“Thank you,” she said with a smile and a wave to the monkey, as if she’d done this exact thing a hundred times before. Maybe she had. The monkey, as if on cue, darted out of our sight.

Seven

“Well,” Lesley said, looking back at me, “this is it.”

“What? The box down there?”

“Yes. Come on,” she said with a tug. I followed her down the sloping floor toward the center of the room, where the shining box waited for us.

“So now you’re going to tell me we have to go inside the box and pass into yet another dimension, right?”

“You’ll see.”

Have you ever heard that anti-joke about the guy who wanted to see what the noise was behind the door in the monastery, but the person telling the joke can’t tell you what the noise was because you aren’t a monk? I was starting to feel like that.

Maybe none of this was really happening. Maybe I was home in bed having a dream. Or maybe Lesley drugged my milk or something. But I was having a really hard time believing any of this was actually real. It sure didn’t feel real.

It also felt like we were walking forever toward that box. I didn’t realize just how huge this room was when we first stepped in. But finally, we got there to the center and stood in front of the thing. Except now I could see it wasn’t just a box. Now that we were right next to it, I could see it was about the size of one of those little ice-fishing huts. Or an old outhouse. It was glowing somehow, which was kind of cool. And it seemed like it was throwing off some kind of warmth. Was this why it felt warm as soon as we stepped into the cave? And why was it warm? Was this thing emitting some kind of toxic radiation that was going to make us grow a third hand or something?

“So this is finally it?” I asked. “Is the Chair in here?”

She nodded excitedly. “Wait until you see inside.” She reached out to grab the door handle, and it swung open. She let me go in first.

I gasped.

It was another massive room, way bigger than the actual box I’d just stepped into. The inside bigger than the outside: How the heck did that work?

The door shut behind us with a thud. And suddenly, there was absolutely no noise. Where I could still faintly hear the waterfall in the distance in the last room, here there was nothing at all. This is probably what it was like being in one of those big sensory deprivation tanks.

Down in the middle of the room – yes, again off in the middle of everything – was something illuminated – yes, something glowing again. As I walked closer, I could see that it was a chair. The Chair was throwing off a vivid glow. It looked like it was covered in diamonds. It glittered. It practically beckoned me to come to it. And I did.

I reached out to touch it, half-expecting it to electrocute me, or blow me up, or something terrible. But all I felt was a soothing warmth. So this was the source of all the warmth we’d been feeling. The Chair was definitely exuding some kind of energy. But it definitely didn’t feel like a bad kind of energy. It felt vaguely inviting, like it wanted to you to come close and relax and let go of your worries.

At that moment I looked down, then over at Lesley, and I realized our clothes were completely dry. Weirder and weirder.    

“So this is the Chair, huh?” I said as Lesley stepped up to stand beside me.

“This is it.”   

“So what do I do now?”

“You sit in it, and you ask it whatever you want to know. And it’ll show you.”

“But how did you know it could do that when you first came down here?”

“I didn’t, until I sat down in it. Then… I just knew. You’ll understand when you try it.”

All of a sudden, I felt like Frodo in the forest glade with Galadriel, when she told him he’d look into the reflecting bowl and see things that are, things that were, and things that have not yet come to pass. I was kind of excited to try it, but also kind of terrified. What if I didn’t like what I saw? But at the same time, I felt like maybe I could get finally some answers to the things I could never understand. The things that gnawed at my mind. Maybe it would make me feel better.

“You look like you’re not sure,” Lesley said.

I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant about the whole thing. “What kind of things did you see?”

“All kinds of stuff.” She pointed toward the Cubs cap on her head. “I know who’s going to win the World Series next year,” she grinned.

“That’s it? So you’re telling me this is just, like, some glorified Magic 8-Ball or something?”

Lesley made an exasperated noise at me. “I know other stuff, too. That was just an example. Here, step aside.” She brushed past me and climbed into the chair.

I watched in amazement as the chair leaned back, all by itself, until she was practically lying down. The glow that the chair threw off had somehow wrapped itself around her. It was like she was becoming part of the chair or something.

“Lesley?”

She shooshed me. I stood there, waiting for something to happen. I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything.

Then I saw her break into a big smile as she stared up at the dark, blank ceiling. Then she giggled. Then she started to laugh like someone had just told her the funniest joke she’d ever heard.

“What is it?” I asked. “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

Just then, the chair began to slowly straighten back up into an upright position. The light that had been enveloping Lesley receded back into the chair, and she hopped off.

“I’m going to be fine,” she said, walking over to me with a big grin.

“What do you mean?”

“The scrape on my leg and the bonk on my head. Remember? I told you I’d ask. It showed me that I’m fine.”

“But I didn’t see anything.”

“Well, I did. I saw lots of things.”

“So what were you laughing at?”

“Huh? Oh, I just let my mind wander, and it showed me some nice things that are going to happen in the future.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged. “Happy stuff.”

“OK, that’s vague,” I said, side-eyeing her.

“You should try it! Go on,” she said. I nearly lost my balance as she gave me a firm nudge forward.

My heart was racing. Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this at all. At first it sounded really neat. Now? Eh, maybe not.

I turned to look at her. “One, stop pushing me. Two, how do I know that when I climb on this thing, someone’s not going to hit the lights and a bunch of your friends will pop out and laugh at me?”

“Jeez, will you stop? Just get on!”

I sighed. Well, what’s the worst that could happen but a little humiliation? Not like that hasn’t happened a million times before. Boy, I must be the most gullible twelve-year-old in the world.

Eight

I stood next to the chair for a long moment. Then I worked up the courage to sit down on the very edge of it. But I hesitated to scoot back any further. I sat there frozen stiff for a second.

“It’s not gonna bite you, Ding-Dong,” Lesley scoffed at me from behind. “Just sit back. It’s fine.”

I turned to her and frowned as I started to slowly ease myself back into the seat. I gasped. The light from the chair started kind of dancing around me. It didn’t hurt. It was just… warm. It was like it was waiting for me to get settled in.

I could do this. I looked back at Lesley again. With a smile, she nodded. “You’re good!” she said.

I slid all the way back and got myself comfortable. As soon as I did, all at once the light from the chair encircled my whole body. It kind of felt like burrowing yourself inside a nice warm blanket that you just pulled fresh out of the dryer. In fact, it was almost exactly like that, because now I couldn’t see anything outside of the bubble of light. It was like I was inside some kind of big force field.

“Lesley? Are you still there?”

“I can see you, but I don’t think you can see me,” she said. “I didn’t see you when I was in the Chair. It’s like you’re here but not here when you sit in the Chair, if that makes any sense.”

“No, Lesley. It makes no sense whatsoever.”

“Just trust me. It’s OK.”

Then I felt myself falling slowly backward. The Chair was reclining. It kept going until I was flat on my back.

I stared up at the blank ceiling, or at least what I perceived as the ceiling.

“Nothing’s happening,” I told Lesley.

“You have to talk to it with your mind,” she said. “Just relax and let the thoughts come.”

“I don’t know how to relax,” I mumbled.

“Just try.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. Then I started to see something. It was grainy, like an old silent movie. I couldn’t make out what it was at first.

“I see something, Lesley!”

It started to come into focus. It filled my vision. At first I thought it was somehow being projected onto the ceiling.

“Can you see this?” I asked her.

“No. I don’t think it works like that. Only the person in the Chair can see it.”

Well, I sure saw it. It was like sitting in a big Imax theater with a wraparound 3-D screen. And I didn’t just see it. I felt like I was right there inside of what I saw.

It was like a movie. A movie of me. I was looking at myself. I was in a car. In the back seat. Then I saw my mom looking back at me with a smile from the front. Looking up toward the rearview mirror, I saw my dad’s eyes, crinkling like they always did whenever he smiled or laughed.

I think I was coming home from the hospital. I must have just been born.

Whoa. This was nuts!

I saw Mom pulling me out of the car, taking me in the house, and putting me in my crib. She bent down to kiss my cheek. Then I saw my dad smiling down at me.

“Hi, Dad!” I said out loud. But he couldn’t hear me. He also bent down to kiss me. Then he walked toward the door.

“Dad, don’t go,” I said. But he walked out of the room with Mom and turned off the lights.

My head started to whirl. The next thing I saw was me taking my first steps in our back yard. Mom reached out to grab me as I stumbled. She caught me just before I would have face-planted into the ground.

The scenes kept unfolding, one by one. There I was sitting down at my desk on my first day of Kindergarten, with Lesley sitting across from me.

“Hey, Lesley!” I called out. “I see you!”

If she said anything back, I didn’t hear it.

Suddenly, Dad was back. He was teaching me how to ride my bike. He took me fishing. He was in my bed reading to me one night, when Mom was working late at the hospital and I couldn’t get to sleep.

Then Mom was back, sitting in her nurse’s scrubs at the kitchen table, looking exhausted. I saw her on the phone with the doctors. I saw Dad sick in bed. I saw us in the hospital looking at X-rays. I saw my mom wiping away tears as she reached out to scoop me up in her arms and tell me it was going to be OK, even though I don’t think she believed her own words.

“Mom, it’s not your fault,” I said out loud.

Then I saw the funeral.

Oh, no.

I panicked.

“Lesley, how do I make it stop?” I called out. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Just say that in your mind,” came her voice. It sounded muddled. “You always have control over it.”

But the images kept coming, faster and faster.

“Where’s Dad?” I called out – not in my mind, but out loud. “Where is he? Is he OK? Tell me he’s not suffering anymore. Please.”

I watched the scenes flip by, like someone was frantically swiping through images on a phone to find the one picture he was looking for. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. Hot tears were streaming down my face.

“Dad?” I called out.

Flip. Flip. Flip.

“Lesley, help me!”

Just then I looked down and saw a hand grab my arm. Lesley’s hand was inside the bubble of light I was in, but I couldn’t see any other part of her. I did hear her voice, but it was muffled, distant, like she was standing on the other side of a wall.

“I’m here,” she said. “It’s OK.”

“No, it’s not. Pull me off this thing. Please!”

I saw both of Lesley’s arms come into view. She wrapped them around me, and with a yank, she tore me off the Chair. My legs felt like jelly, but Lesley managed to hold me up. She just stood there with her arms wrapped around me as I cried.

Nine

“That was terrible,” I said, sobbing into her shoulder. I felt so stupid bawling like a big baby.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her own voice quaking. “It was my fault.”

I pulled back to look at her and rubbed at my eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I didn’t prepare you. It’ll show you whatever you want, but it can be good stuff or bad stuff. I think it picks up on your mood.”

“Great,” I mumbled, wiping away my tears. “So it’s also a giant mood ring.”

I gave in to my weak legs and plopped down on the floor. Lesley came down and sat next to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Chair returning to its upright position, somehow all by itself. Well, it does seemingly have a mind of its own. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“The difference between you and me,” Lesley said, “is that I usually think of happy stuff. You’re all doom and gloom. I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

She was right about that. I’d been doom and gloom ever since Dad went away. It didn’t use to be like that. I used to happy, like Lesley. Now it was like I was afraid of everything. So was Mom. Every time I get sick or hurt myself, Mom gets frantic. She smothers me. I know why she does it. “Don’t you leave me too, kiddo.” I’ve lost count of how many times she’s said that.

“So this thing is useless for me,” I said.

Lesley shrugged. “I don’t know. I was hoping it would help in some way.”

“What do you mean, help?”

“Like, maybe it could help you sort some stuff out. I just miss the way you used to be.”

My gaze fell to the floor. “Yeah. Me, too.” I thought for a minute, then looked back up at her. “Wait. Did you do all this just for me?”

“Kind of, yeah,” she said with a sheepish grin. “Once I knew what it could do, I guess I wanted to see if it could help you.”

“But why?”

She sighed. She sounded like she was exasperated with me.

“Do you ever wonder why I prank you so much?”

I shrugged. “You like picking on me?”

She swatted my arm. “No, Ding-Dong. Because I like you!”

I frowned. “You have a funny way of showing it sometimes.”

“Don’t you get it? I want to make you laugh. I want you to take yourself a little less seriously. I want you to lighten up. Have fun!”

“That’s really hard for me to do,” I said, looking down. 

“I know, and it hurts me to see you so sad and scared all the time. I want to fix you, and I don’t know how.”

“But why, Lesley? It’s not your responsibility to fix me. Why should you even care?”

She frowned. “Do you really know that little about me after twelve years?”

“What do you mean?”

She reached out to take my hands in hers. “You know, I don’t just like you. I really like you. You’re my best friend in the whole world.”

“Me?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, the monkey, Ding-Dong. Of course, you! I’d do anything for you. You do realize that, right? That’s why I brought you down here.”

She’d do anything for me? There went that little flip-flop in my stomach again. I didn’t know what to say. So I just gave her an uncomfortable shrug and looked away.

Ten

“So… what kind of stuff do you actually see when you’re in the Chair?” I asked. “Other than the Cubs winning the World Series?”

She laughed. “I mostly just ask fun little stuff, like where am I going to live when I grow up? What kind of car am I going to drive? Where am I going to go to college? What kind of career will I have? Am I going to finally win the school spelling bee next year?”

I laughed too. It ticked her off that she came in second to Nick Swanson. He was such a teacher’s pet.

“I also found out where Max came from, and why.”

That got my attention. I looked back at her.

“Remember how we put up posters but we could never find an owner?”

“Yeah.”

“His owners abandoned him. Just let him out of the car and drove off. And he walked right to our house.”

I looked at the Chair, and then back at Lesley. “It showed you that?”

She nodded. “Not only that, but it told me there was a reason he came to our house.”

“What do you mean, a reason?”

“Remember when Max sniffed out my mom’s cancer?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why.”

“Max came to your house to save your mom’s life?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“So you can ask the Chair stuff like that and it’ll answer you?”

“Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Anything you want to know.”

Now I wanted to hop back in the Chair and ask it why Lesley’s mom got to live while my dad had to die. But if my state of mind controls what I see in the Chair, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. I wanted to know the answer, but at the same time I didn’t.

“But I asked it if my dad was OK and not suffering anymore and in a better place, and it was like the Chair couldn’t find the answer,” I told Lesley. “Did I do something wrong?”

Lesley started to say something, but stopped herself.

“What is it?”

She shook her head. “Maybe it can’t give you the answer if there is no answer.”

“But how could there not be an answer?”

Lesley looked up and chewed on her lip, like she was trying to formulate a question in her head. Then she looked back at me.

“What exactly did you see?”

“I basically saw flashbacks of my life, up until Dad died. It was like those near-death experiences you hear about when your brain does this highlight reel of your entire existence.” I stopped to think. “Are you absolutely sure we’re not dead?”

Lesley laughed. “Pretty sure.”  

I didn’t know what else to say or do. The silence engulfed us for what seemed like hours.

Finally, Lesley broke the silence.

“Look, I don’t know exactly how this thing works. All I know is that I’m usually in a good mood when I hop on. Just curious to know stuff. You know? And I think that has something to do with it.” She paused. “It did tell me something sad once. When it did, I kind of got the highlight reel like you did. It’s like it spins out of control if your own mind is spinning out of control.”

“How did you stop it?”

“I just got off and calmed myself down. Then I was OK. But I also couldn’t unsee what I saw, and now I’m stuck with it forever. So I just try to make sure I’m in a good place when I get on, and I don’t ask stuff I don’t want to know the answer to.”

I was almost afraid to ask, but now my curiosity was killing me.

“You want to know what it is, don’t you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I know when Max is going to die.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “Even worse, I know how.”

I started to ask when, but I stopped myself. The “even worse” part made me realize that I didn’t really want to know. I reached out to hug her as the tears streamed down her cheeks. I just held her for a while in silence.

“I think I understand what you’re saying now about how this works,” I said.

She pulled away and dried her eyes. “Yeah,” she said with a sniffle.

Eleven

The silence settled around us again. Again, Lesley broke it.

“So… do you just wanna go home and forget about this, or…?”

I looked back at the Chair and thought for a minute. I could do this. I really wanted to get an answer. Maybe in the end it really couldn’t tell me anything, but I could sure try one more time.

I got to my feet and took the few steps over to where the Chair sat gleaming out from the dark. I took a deep breath and sat myself down. The light blanketed me as the chair slowly reclined back.

“Hey, Lesley?”

“Yeah?” came the muffled reply from behind the veil of light.

“Is it OK if I hold your hand?”

Without another word spoken between us, I saw Lesley’s hand come into view. I clasped onto it as I took a deep breath.

“Just try to relax,” she said. “I’m right here with you.”

That did actually make me feel better.

I slowed my breathing and tried to clear my mind. I thought about Canyon, my weird hippie uncle, and how he said we have to tame the monkey mind. He was into all that Buddhist meditation stuff. He said if your mind hangs on to a thought you don’t want, just visualize it like a cloud and let it float on by.

So that’s what I tried to do. Thought. Cloud. Thought. Cloud. Breathe. Relax. I held on to Lesley’s hand a little bit tighter.

I breathed a thought out from my mind.

Where is my dad now? Is he OK? Is he happy? Does he miss me?

I was starting to pile up the questions, so I figured I should stop there. Hopefully that would be enough.

Slowly, the clouds I’d been envisioning in my head began to materialize on the ceiling. So far, so good. This seemed peaceful, at least. No frantic scrolling through memories to find something hopeful to cling on to. Just clouds.

Then I saw him. I saw those same crinkly eyes that looked down at me in my crib when I was a newborn baby. He was gently smiling. He looked so serene.

“Hey, Dad,” I said out loud. My voice shook as a tear rolled down my cheek. “I miss you, Dad.”

I waited for him to say something. Do something. Anything. Was there something else I should say?

No. Don’t panic. Just let yourself be in the moment.

I took a deep breath and focused on his face. His smile grew wider. A big, toothy grin, like he was getting ready to laugh. It was like he was trying to talk to me without words.

“Are you OK, Dad? Are you happy? Are you at peace?”

He still didn’t say anything. But I could feel a sense of calm washing over me. I think it was coming from Dad himself. He was letting me know he was OK. I knew. I knew it in my heart.

Finally, I knew.

“I love you, Dad,” I choked out through my tears.

Just as slowly as he’d appeared, he gradually disappeared back into the clouds.

I had no idea if what I’d just seen was from a memory I held from some point in my life, or if it actually was Dad reaching out to me from the Great Beyond. But I decided it didn’t matter. I felt his love, and that was enough.

Twelve

I wiped my eyes and told the Chair to lift me up. The image of the clouds disappeared and I saw Lesley looking at me with a hopeful expression.

“Well?” she asked as I hopped off.

“I saw what I needed to,” I said. “I’m good.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Better than I’ve been in a long time, actually.” I looked Lesley in the eyes. Not knowing what else to do, I reached out and scooped her into a tight hug.

“Thanks for bringing me down here,” I said, gently rocking her back and forth.

“What are friends for?” she said, hugging me back. 

I wish I could have just stayed wrapped up in her arms like that forever. It felt so good. So safe. So… loving.

I released her and realized I was still crying. I sniffled and wiped the snot off my nose.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a crybaby today,” I said.

She frowned at me. “You don’t need to apologize for crying, Ding-D…” She pinched her mouth shut in mid-sentence. Then her expression softened into a smile. “Damian.”

“Damian.” Hearing my real name come out of her mouth sounded so nice. She hadn’t used it in so long.

Dang flippy-floppy stomach.

“So how do we get out of here?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“Well, we can go back the way we came. Or…” she looked behind me at the Chair.

“What? Don’t tell me you can think yourself back.”

“I asked it once out of curiosity. I just didn’t feel like doing all that climbing. Next thing I knew I was back home.”

“So it’s like a Magic 8-Ball and a mood ring and a genie in a bottle.”

She laughed. “I guess. Hope we never run out of wishes if that’s the case.”

Her laugh was so pretty. So was her smile. Why was I noticing this stuff all of a sudden? What was the matter with me?

“Before we go,” she said, “can I ask a favor?”

“Sure.”

“I saw something else one time when I was in the Chair. I want you to see it too. It was another reason I wanted you to come down here.”

“Oh-kaay,” I said, trying to see if I could pick out from her expression what she was up to. “Am I going to like this or not?”

“I hope you like it,” she giggled.

I looked at the Chair, then back at her.

“Do you trust me?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “But I’ll only do it on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“I get to hold your hand again?”

She laughed that pretty laugh of hers. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I slid back onto the chair and slipped into the veil of light. Lesley’s hand came into view, and I grabbed onto it. Not out of fear, like before, but just because I was happy to have her there with me.

When the chair finished reclining, I flinched in surprise. Lesley’s face came into view, right over mine. She was leaning down into the bubble to whisper to me what I should ask the Chair. Then she lightly kissed me on the cheek and disappeared from my view.

Ah, the flippy-floppies. I was really starting to like them.

I relaxed like I did before. In my mind, I asked the question Lesley said I should ask. And just like before, blurred images slowly began to take shape, until the movie was rolling all around me.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I saw two people holding hands, going on dates, laughing, enjoying life. I saw a ring sliding onto a finger. Gowns, dresses, tuxedos. A house I didn’t recognize, but one that the people in my vision did. A house that I could feel was filled with love.

The people who lived there got into a daily routine. Off to work, back home, making dinner together, falling asleep in front of the TV snuggled up on the couch.

Then… kids. A boy and a girl, who both looked strangely familiar. I saw their first loves and their heartbreaks. School dances. Senior proms. Graduations. More gowns and tuxedos. Then, grandchildren.

I saw good times, bad times. I saw life unfolding.

And it was beautiful. All of it.

“Do you see it?” came Lesley’s muffled voice.

“I see it,” I said, squeezing her hand a little tighter.

“Everything’s going to be OK,” she said.

She was right.

Epilogue

The next day, Lesley and I were in her back yard playing catch. Boy, did she have a mean fastball. It stung my hand every time the ball hit my mitt. She was good. It always looked like she was resisting the urge to laugh whenever I tossed the ball back to her. I think I threw more like a girl than she did. But at least that day, she wasn’t teasing me me about it, which was a nice change of pace.

Lesley had a big old bandage on her leg. When we got back, I took her across the street to my house and asked Mom if she could look her over. I knew it made Mom feel good to help. She bandaged up Lesley’s leg, gave her a quick concussion check, and was satisfied that we didn’t have to rush off to the ER. She told us to be more careful when we were playing and sent us on our way. I thought Mom handled that pretty well.  

As we were tossing the ball back and forth, I thought about everything I saw down there in the Chair. It was a lot to take in, and honestly, I don’t know how often I’m going to go back. I think maybe life is more fun if you just let it surprise you from one day to the next.

Still, I’m glad I know what I know.

I’m also glad we didn’t make the climb back up to the surface afterward. When I was done with my session in the Chair and Lesley and I had a chance to talk about stuff, I thought for a minute about how we should go home. Lesley had said we could just think ourselves back. But the more I thought about that option, the more I wondered: What if I think the wrong thing and I end up in, like, Bangladesh or something? She just laughed at me and wondered if I’d learned anything at all from our adventure.

And she was right. I didn’t need to be afraid. I needed to take a chance. I needed to trust once in a while that things would be all right. I knew there’d still be times in life when it was going to be hard to see how things could possibly turn out OK. But Lesley settled that discussion, at least the one we had about getting back home, when she looked me dead in the eyes down there beside the Chair and said to me, “Do you trust me, Damian?”

And I just smiled back at her and said, “I do.”

Then it was just a matter of working out the logistics for our mental return trip. Did we have to go back one at a time, or was there some way we could go together? We really wanted to go back together. Not only did we not want to leave one of us down there alone, but it would just be so much nicer if we could go back as one. Lesley didn’t know the answer any more than I did. But she had a hunch that if we just asked the Chair to send us back together, it would.

But did we have to both be on the Chair at the same time? And if so, how were we going to do that? It wasn’t very big. Again, she had an idea. She had me lie down on the chair. The light engulfed me and she disappeared from my view.

I waited.

“Peek-a-boo!” she said, as she pushed her face through the barrier, just like she did when she’d whispered into my ear earlier.

“You ready?” she asked.

“Ready,” I said.

With that, she hopped up onto the chair and leaned herself back against me. I slid my arms around her waist, and we waited for a second as we looked cautiously around us.

Well, the Chair didn’t eject us. It didn’t collapse under our combined weight.

“I think we’re good,” I said.

“Yeah,” Lesley said. “Step One complete.”

“Oh, hey, here goes Step Two.” I watched as the Chair’s bubble of light spread out from me to surround both of us.

“So far, so good,” I said.

“OK,” Lesley said. “Ready for Step Three?”

“Yep.”

I braced myself as Lesley rolled over to face me. That part I was expecting. What I wasn’t expecting was when she grabbed my hands and pinned them above my head, lacing her fingers between mine.

I looked up at our joined hands, then back at her. “Extending your record as the unbeaten backyard wrestling champion?”

Lesley grinned. “Just making extra sure we don’t lose each other on the way back.”

“Whatever you say.”

Anyway, I wasn’t going to complain.

As I looked up at Lesley, I saw the lights from the Chair dancing in her pretty green eyes. Everything about Lesley was so pretty. She looked nice, she smelled nice… heck, she felt nice. The feeling I had at that moment was so weird, almost like I was looking at her for the first time. Jeez, if this is what puberty does to a guy, I was in big trouble.

“All right,” Lesley said, “let’s do this.”

“So are you sure this is going to work?”

“If we think it, it should work. Right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I suddenly had a Star Trek flashback as I told her with a grin, “I’m not sure I’m ready to have my molecules disassembled.”

We both burst out laughing. It felt so good to laugh.

“OK,” she said, “let’s go. Two to beam up, Scotty.”

I watched as her face came down slowly, closer and closer, to meet mine. Then our lips touched.

Wow, talk about flippy-flops.

I concentrated the best I could, which admittedly wasn’t easy while I was getting my first proper kiss. But we agreed this was the best way to make sure we both made it back together. Well, OK, maybe I kind of suggested it, and she giggled and said it sounded like a great idea. We just figured that if we were connected, then maybe our brains would be too. Kind of like a Vulcan mind meld, but maybe a little more enjoyable.

I took in a deep breath, and in my mind I asked the Chair to send us home.

Instantly, there was a bright flash of light. And the next thing I knew, we were in Lesley’s back yard.

Just like that.

And here we were, the very next day. Just carrying on like we always had. Two best friends, who now had a little sneak peek of what life held in store for the two of them. I gotta say, what I saw wasn’t all that bad.

“Damian! Heads up!”

“Huh?”

Lesley’s voice broke me out of my daydream. The baseball was whizzing right toward my face. I didn’t see her throw it. Instinctively, I ducked out of the way and the ball rolled across the yard.

Just then, Max came bounding out through the dog door and charged after the ball.

“Apparently he thinks we’re playing fetch,” I said. Lesley just laughed. Gosh, I love that laugh. I could listen to that for the rest of my life.

I turned around to see Max releasing the ball at my feet. I dropped to my knees to give him a good ear scratch.

“Good Max,” I said. “Good boy.” He wagged his tail like crazy and started licking my face. Not quite as nice as Lesley’s kisses, but I figured I’ll take it.

The future would work itself out however it was going to. For now, we were going to just enjoy being kids, taking things one day at a time, and enjoying what each day gave us. If the Chair taught me anything, it was to live life to the fullest, no matter what it throws at you. Make the most of the time you’ve got. Hold on to the good stuff and let the bad stuff go. This is a lot for two kids our age to take in. But something tells me we can deal with it.

Like Lesley said, everything’s going to be OK.

I trust her.

(Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash.)