From a House to a Home

By Devin Barrett

It was October 11th, 2007, the day we moved into our (new) lake house. I was very skeptic about the house, the neighbors, and everything in between. I knew I would miss my old neighbors, tremendously. I sucked it up and tagged along for the move. The movers arrived at a chilling 6:30 in the morning; the brisk fall wind off the lake wasn’t helping. Luckily, our new house was only five minutes away.
When we arrived, I quickly walked through the new empty house, wishing it would be as good as my old one. The movers arrived and “dropped” of all of our stuff, we arranged it the way we’d like and sat down to take it all in. I remember this day quite vividly because this was also the date of our annual light house festival. We traveled to the lighthouse and looked through all of the local merchant’s stands; we than bought a few items to make our new house feel like a home. When we returned to the house, we put the new items in their “right” place. I soon realized, maybe this house will be even better than our old one.

What is Reality Anyway?

As Lucy and I wondered down the old Tree Top railroad, I heard a loud screeching sound,
“Lucy, watch out!”
“Ahhhhhh!”
It had been Pterodactyl Man, the town’s great superhero; he saved my sister just as the tree-top express wondered down the fully covered train tracks, caused by the overgrown vegetated surroundings. I can’t stand this train, the operator, Old Man Iowa, he is certainly crazy. I swear that man gets absolutely no sleep! He always falls asleep on the train, while he is supposed to be operating it, our terrified civilian’s only hope is Pterodactyl Man. He sweeps down from the rocky Pointe Pleasant everyday in hope of saving one of our town’s people. My sister and I don’t want to rely on him anymore, we are fleeing this town for good.
We traveled down the tracks for a few days now, both of us looking quite pitiful, we hadn’t seen civilized plumbing for a day now, Lucy’s hair was beginning to become very stringy. On the bright side, we hadn’t had anymore encounters with Old Man Iowa and his train. We did however run into the evil little leprechaun in the Butterfly Meadows, he was asleep though.
“Today is a new day!” I proclaimed to Lucy.
“How so?”
“The elevator to reality was only a few miles away!”
“I can’t believe it; I just can’t believe that we will see the real life behind all of this mayhem!”
We traveled down the track for a few hours; we were moving very slow, Lucy had injured her ankle during the train track rescue. We stopped and had a little picnic, I picked up a loaf of bread and some jam at the last General Store back some way.
“I am going to miss this place”, confessed Lucy.
“I will too, but I think we’ll be much better off with out all of these distractions”, I tried to put it in the kindest way possible; after all, some of the “distractions” were Lucy’s friends.
We packed up the picnic and started down the tracks yet again, I quickly saw the great elevator of reality, the one that we’d all heard about. Lucy and I raced as quickly as we could to the elevator; we barely managed to keep our feet on the ground. We pressed the reality button and the elevator went soaring up into the sky. The door opened, and we cautiously walked out and looked around. We both noticed all of the violence and destruction. We then asked ourselves,
“What is reality anyway?”