Ugh, I'm cold. Even though I'm under a thick comforter, the sheets beneath me feel almost painfully crisp the way they do when you first crawl into bed on a winter's night. The comforter smells like moth balls, so I pull it away from my face and feel cold air rush up my nostrils. One window is immediately opposite the bed and is halfway open, accounting for the rush of cold air. The panes of glass are too dirty to see through. I look around. The room is tiny, barely big enough for the bed. I can sit up and touch each of the 4 grey walls. The door is blocked by the heavy wooden foot board of the bed, which looks like some ugly Victorian monster of a piece of furniture. The bed is so large, or the room so small that I can't see the floor. Just outside the door, someone is murmuring. Beneath the bed I can hear a scrabbling sound, like a mouse running for cover.
The forest is thin, yet dark. The trees are tall, but haven't gained the thickness to match their height. There are lots of leaves and branches underfoot. It's hard to tell how light or dark the forest would be on a sunny day because of the continual mist of rain that is falling around me. It looks like the woods from the damn scary bootlegged movie that we all watched at a friend's house. I think it was called the Blair Witch Project. I really don't need to be thinking about that movie while I'm wandering around in here.
What path? Sometimes I stumble on what looks like it might be a hiking trail, but it ends so quickly or disappears into a stand of bushes that they must just be animal trails. But mostly I'm just trying to walk in the same direction - isn't moss always supposed to grow on the north side of a tree? I wish I'd brought a compass.
It looks just like the creek that was on my grade school's grounds. It varies in width and speed and depth, sometimes thin, shallow, and slow, sometimes wide, deep, and fast. I know that if I wander further down stream I'll come to a point where it branches in two to go around a little rocky island. I also know that if I continue to follow it, it'll suddenly become too deep for me to stand in just before it joins in with a river. I look down through the clear water, which is sun-warmed here at the edge but I know will be cold towards the middle, and try to see fish through the eddies it makes as it flows around my ankles. I don't see anything now, but I can remember coming down to the creek on warm days near the end of the school year and spending hours standing in the cold water, waiting for a crayfish to crawl out from under one of the rocks. I was the only girl that ever managed to catch one. It gave me the creeps so I threw it back in the water.
It's a jelly jar with a quilted pattern pressed into the glass. The glass is sturdy and thick. The two-piece twist top those things always have has a ticky-tacky piece of cross-stich attached to the flat piece that the flat piece metal that the round, screw-part of the top holds down to cover the contents. It's dirty, but I can see that it is a sprig of strawberries.
The key is thick, heavy, and rusted. The first two prongs are of different lengths, the longer one being on the end tip of the key. It looks like a third one has broken off. The handle at the opposite end of the key looks like a Celtic eternity knot. I wish I knew what it opened, probably an attic chock full of old trunks, books, and pictures.