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// To Start At Home And Go Afar 
// Story: So It Was Before, Now It Is No More 
// by Unstoppable 
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It was a simple thought really; not one that normally would’ve received a real response. It was the kind of thought one would have on a lazy summer day when there was nothing better to do.

“What would it be like to live somewhere else?”, Charlie sat down in the grass. He was tired of living in the same town he had spent his entire life in. It was a small town with a small population and not a lot ever happened anywhere near it. Sure he had moved from his parent’s cottage to his own when he became old enough, but they were always just a dirt road away. He could throw a pebble onto their doorstep if he wanted to. No, to Charlie moving only one road away didn’t really count as moving.

“I’ve spent the first half of my life here,” said Charlie as he felt the texture of the grass,”but now that I think about it I’m not so sure I want to spend the second half here.”

There was a momentary pause between that last statement and Charlie’s next action; to Charlie though, it felt like an hour. In that perceived hour Charlie thought he could see the sun move through the sky. He felt the wind blow on him and the heat starting to collect on his body. Life felt good and Charlie knew it.

After Charlie snapped out of his trance, he remembered that he needed to go wash the dishes he was too lazy to do the previous night. He proceeded to get up and make his way to his cottage. When he entered his front door he proceeded directly to his sink.

Charlie began to wash dishes. He wanted to be doing anything other than chores so he did anything he could to speed things up. He used his mouth to hold a plate while he used dishwashing detergent to wash two more plates in the sink. He was starting to make good progress.

However, not one minute after he had started on his chores Charlie said, “Oh how I miss the grass already.”

In fact, Charlie wanted to get back to laying on the grass so badly that it almost seemed to be calling out to him, “come here, Charlie.”

Charlie stopped washing his dishes and said, “Ok that was too real to be my imagination.”

The voice repeated itself, “come here, Charlie,” That time a little louder and clearer. In fact, it was just loud enough that it confirmed Charlie’s claim.

“Hello?” Charlie began to dry his hands as he looked around “Who are you?”

The voice responded again by repeating itself, “come here, Charlie” this time, loud enough, that it had become clear where it originated from.

Charlie began to move to his hallway. He believed that the voice he was hearing had come from the bathroom right next to his kitchen. He tried to move as quietly as he could without making a sound. This was physically hard for him particularly on hard-surface floors, nonetheless, he managed.

“creeek” was the sound he heard as he opened the door to his bathroom. He stepped inside and looked around, only to be greeted with what he would normally expect, a regular bathroom.

Charlie’s downstairs bathroom was a half-bathroom. It didn’t have a tub like his upstairs bathroom had but it had a sink, a counter with drawers, and a mirror. The mirror was the most defining feature of his downstairs bathroom. It was given to him by his parents when he moved out of their cottage and got his own.

In all honesty it was a simple mirror. It wasn’t much to look at. It didn’t even really have a frame. However, if one were to look on the back of that mirror they would see a message written by Charlie’s parents. The message read, “From us to you, a mirror for you to look at everyday to remind you of how proud we are of you and to remind you that you are now an adult.”

That message and the memory that came with it meant a lot to Charlie. He understood that a mirror was a weird present for his parents to give him and the message an even weirder one but his parents were always rather strange in their actions.

Charlie stood there for what seemed to be hours looking at that mirror and thinking about his parents and how much he loved them. Eventually he remembered that he was looking for a voice and that he thought that he had tracked it to his bathroom. He looked around once more and stated the obvious, “I was wrong, there is no voice in this bathroom and probably not in this entire house.”

Charlie let out a loud sigh. He began to have doubts about his previous judgement call that the voice was too real to be a figment of his imagination. He was just about to turn around when he heard the same voice say, “come here, Charlie.”

This time Charlie froze for a moment. He distinctly heard the voice coming from his mirror and turned his head only long enough to get a glance of a face that wasn’t like any other he had seen before. Seeing this face shocked Charlie. It wasn’t a bad face, quite the opposite it was actually much nicer than any face he had seen before. But the fact remained that it was still strange. He didn’t have any more time to ponder what he saw because he suddenly vanished.

Flash!

In less then a second Charlie no longer stood in front of his mirror in his small cottage. He had disappeared from the only place he had ever lived and was taken to a place he couldn’t even imagine. Charlie had started the second, longer, half of his life. He was going to get his lazy summer afternoon question answered, and he was going to have it answered in the best way it could possibly be answered.