I wake up to see myself travelling over darkness. What is that? Something bumpy? My foot hovers over the pedal, and my hands are placed on the steering wheel, as if everything is normal. Something bright screams into my eyes blindingly breaking into echoes. I hear the monotonous hum of an engine. A car engine. My vision starts to blur in and out while trying to adjust to this new environment. Gagging any specks of unconsciousness left in my lungs.
This has happened before. But seriously where am I?
Black… Maybe a darkish green. Wait, I’m in a forest driving along a dirt road in basically complete darkness. Okay, that I can handle, nothing too uncanny.
Honestly I should probably make the best out of it right? I turn on the radio, hoping to hear my favourite jazz song. Suddenly, prickly white noises blare and fill the car with a nauseous feeling. Nope, not today. I click the button, silencing what my obedient consciousness has to offer me today.
I continue to drive along the dirt road with nothing else to guide me other than the illumination of my car lights. Hey, what car is this anyways? A bugatti would be a fun little treat, hope it’s not something funky like a bagel on wheels. I look around and notice it’s nothing but a beat down silver 2005 Toyota Corolla. This seems too normal, too good to be true. Skepticism starts to bubble deep within my stomach, what does my mind have in store for me today?
Most of the time this happens something weird just has to come up. Like that one time Beyonce started to throw bagels at my roof that I’d just finished painting, or when I couldn’t yell for help as a group of medieval witches chased me around on the beach. Something about this time feels off, there’s a murky look to my pool of perception -something I can’t quite see.
All of it seems to be quite peaceful: the gentle roar of the engine, the unending dirt road, the unlit forest, and the sky that I can’t quite see clearly. I fall into a trance -hypotised by the constant road- and zone out of my doubts for a bit.
Abruptly, a bear comes out of the woods. It stands there looking at me. It’s a brown grizzly bear with beady eyes that have a facade of green due to the light reflecting back. The bear has a large build and stays there, not moving. I have a feeling that I shouldn’t look away.
Huh, that’s kinda strange. Well I can’t just run the bear over… So I stayed, I stayed in the car and waited, hoping that it would get bored and move on.
The bear didn’t move. I stared at it for quite a long time; can’t tell you how long but it felt pretty long but passed by quickly.
“Bang!” “Bang!” “Bang!” Someone was knocking at the car’s trunk. I turned around to see who or what it was, only to find out a man was standing there. His face was lit from underneath, giving me the impression that I was the victim of a horror movie and he was the murder. But he looked quite normal, he looked like a regular guy.
“Dude I can’t get out of this forest and finally someone else arrived. Come on, we have to find a way out.” he declared.
I looked down and suddenly I wasn’t in the car anymore. I was standing between the bear and the man. The bear to my left and the man to my right at a distance.
I got a closer look at the man. He was average height, caucasian male with brown eyes and a stubbly beard. He wore a hoodie and some regular jeans. He looked like a regular guy.
“Come on, let’s go. Come with me, what are you waiting for?” The guy said, he didn’t sound impatient, he just sounded so… normal.
I looked to my left to see the bear, who looked at me so intensely I couldn’t tell if I was its next meal or its next cub. I heard something in my head, vaguely. ‘Come with me.’ It echoed in my head as I maintained eye contact with the bear.
“Dude, what are you doing?” The guy asked again. “Come with me.”
Your pick.
Writer – Bianca Hu
Editor – Eva McNulty
Artist – Marianna Wang
–September 2025–
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