July/August 2018

The river was my refuge. It was more of a stream, really, a tiny but powerful stream tucked into a corner of the Cascade Mountains. While my dad argued with my mom and my mom argued with my six brothers and sisters (and they argued with each other), I slipped out of the house and walked two miles to be at that magical place with the dozens of small waterfalls cascading into the water. I imagined some explorer discovering this place, long ago, and naming the entire mountain range after it. Cascading waterfalls…Cascade Mountains. I brought my journal, pen, and ink: nothing else. My “lucky rock” was a particularly large one in the center of the stream. I had to skip across stones that I had carefully placed to get to it, risking being swept away if I fell. I sat on my lucky rock and let the words rush out of my pen like one of the waterfalls around me. I wrote about everything: my pesky siblings, the beauty around me, and things I had never seen, but knew better than the real world. Some things about my writing were difficult to explain: like my use of a dip pen, or why I literally refused to write anywhere other than here. Maybe the answer to the latter question was simply that I couldn’t focus in the constant noise of home or school. One day, I was writing about a girl lost in an Egyptian pyramid: With each tentative step forward, Kara became more and more aware that she was hopelessly lost. Although Kara understood the many hieroglyphs on the walls, they bore no information that could help her escape. The skeletons and mummies piled in the corners didn’t suddenly come alive and tell her which way to go (although Kara was glad that didn’t happen, because it would have been creepy). Kara tried hard not to panic, but she couldn’t help it when… I stopped writing. The ink on my pen dripped onto my journal, making a large blot that covered up the last line I had written, but I didn’t notice. Something smelled strange. It was an underground, earthy sort of smell that filled my nostrils. When I closed my eyes, I could see an underground tunnel stretching out before me. The source of the odd smell wasn’t in sight. I looked down at my journal with the intent to keep writing, but the contents began spinning before my eyes in a tornado of words, commas, and periods. They all jumbled together, and the rushing water became inaudible. I screamed, but my voice sounded distant and garbled, as if I were on the phone and the connection was wavering. What was happening? Was I going insane, and losing my hearing too? I blinked, and the stream was gone. I was in a dark corridor with dust and cobwebs all around me. All I had in my hands was a torch. For a moment, I wondered where I was, but I wasn’t left wondering for long once I turned to look at the wall and saw hieroglyphics there. I knew then for sure where I was, and I wasn’t thrilled about it. I was inside my story: “A Cryptic Crypt.” The pyramid carried the same smell that I had caught a whiff of back in the mountains, in the real world. I never thought I would long for my siblings, or want to escape one of my own stories. It was practically my dream to be transported into one of my stories, but I never expected to feel so stuck if I was. I thought that I’d feel free, ecstatic. How I wished that I had been writing about what I usually wrote about: friendship and everyday courage and trying to make it through middle school, and those things that seemed so simple compared to this. While observing my dire predicament, I paced around the corridor and almost tripped over a cold, round object. I picked it up and dropped it with a small shriek when I realized it was a skull. Then I felt like something was crawling up my neck. I slapped it, and it fell lifeless into my hand: it was a beetle the size of my palm, and I now noticed thousands more creeping along the walls and floor. I really started to freak out when the torch sputtered, flickered, and went out. I tried desperately to reignite it by dragging it along the floor, but I didn’t produce a single spark. All the torch gathered was beetles. I was trapped in blackness with huge beetles and skeletons, armed with nothing except for what was basically a beetle-covered stick. “Take me back!” I shouted into the darkness. My voice echoed for several seconds around the catacombs. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I was panicked. I nearly dropped the extinguished torch when the wall was suddenly emblazoned with giant, glowing hieroglyphs that weren’t there before. I couldn’t read hieroglyphics, but I knew someone who could. Trying not to think about the beetles that were probably all over me, I started running down the passageway with my hands out so I wouldn’t run into a wall. My own shallow breathing and the pattering of my feet were the only sounds, but I hoped to hear something else—or rather, someone else. I had to find Kara. The pyramid seemed bigger than the entire state of Washington. I wandered around through its winding passageways for hours. Once, I came to a five-way fork in the path. I listened at every corridor, one by one, for any sounds that might indicate another human’s presence, but none of the corridors looked promising. I just muttered “eeny meeny miney moe” and took the path I ended up pointing at. It proved to be a mistake, because I was more lost than ever. “ Here was someone that I had created on paper as a living, breathing, three-dimensional human being