Dream

Loreto Esmorte frowned.

The man with short black hair felt his stomach turn over, but the strange feeling in his heart was even worse than that feeling. Then, Jessica Esmorte also woke up.

"What happened?" Her fingers brushed against his blue eyes.

"I do not know. I saw something shiny, and all of a sudden I felt like I missed something. Do you feel that way too?" Loreto Esmorte touched his wife's shoulders, looking for any strange signs.

"Stop being weird, it must just be our stomach playing with us. We ate a lot of lasagna, I'm feeling full so far," her lips parted and her beautiful face outlined her tiredness in the form of a long, lazy yawn.

"Since you're so suspicious, why don't you go see what happened? If something has really changed, go to Judith's room first and call her here."

The blonde woman didn't wait for her husband's response and turned to the corner of the wall, her eyes filled with sleep.

Loreto nodded and left the couple's bedroom.

His first destination was his daughter's room, but the black-haired man's steps froze when he saw something that shouldn't have been in front of him suddenly appear.

Human footsteps echoed, and a voice followed it.

"Dad, did you feel it too?"

It was Judith, her eyes were as tired as her mother's, but her gaze gleamed with something between dread and doubtfulness.

"Yes." The man then approached his daughter and hugged her very tactfully. His careful hands checked his daughter's safety, and the sigh of relief escaped his lips when Loreto realized she was okay.

"Dad, tell me, has your room suddenly started to glow too?"

"..."

There were no words from his side, just eyes wide with surprise.

"So, it wasn't a hallucination..."

Judith's heart sank into the abyss, and at any moment the young woman felt that paranormal activities would begin to take place. The horror movies she watched were not few, much less light.

"Judith, relax. We're still indoors and it could all still have been a coincidence. Don't forget ghosts don't exist," Loreto's hands tightened their grip when they noticed that Judith was trembling with fear.

'This is something I never understood, she is always afraid to see horror movies, but even so, she insists on watching… Even I wasn't that dumb as a teenager!' Thinking to himself, Loreto just shook his head.

"Where's Mommy?"

The young woman's voice brought the man out of his reverie.

"Oh, she's sleeping in the bedroom. Let's go there."

Rhythmic, hurried footsteps echoed through the house, before long the father and daughter pair were in front of the master bedroom. To their surprise, however, the woman who was both wife and mother was nowhere to be seen.

"Jessica!"

"Mom!"

They felt their hearts sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss, the demon that lived in that dark place was about to eat the hopes that fed the minds of these poor humans who still wanted to believe that paranormal activities didn't exist.

Their footsteps invaded the room anxiously, the man looked to the right and the young woman looked to the left as they entered the door in front of them. The room was as empty as cold soda cans during the hot summer.

"Jessica!"

"Mom!"

"Crap! Stop screaming!"

The angry voice of the woman they knew too well echoed through the couple's bedroom. It was at that moment that Loreto wanted to slap himself in the face, as he didn't even consider the possibility that Jessica had gone to the bathroom in their bedroom.

"Hehehe, a thousand apologies my dear."

"It's my fault, Mom. I made Dad nervous about… about the weird thing that happened."

The woman inside the bathroom didn't say anything for entire seconds, just when the sound of a solid falling into the water echoed: followed by the noise of the flush, the door opened. The myth that pretty women didn't shit was just a myth after all.

The speed of Jessica's actions were such that if not for the water in her hands, Loreto would have serious doubts whether or not she had washed her hands.

"What happened?"

Her white nightgown was visible in the light from the bedroom, exposing her beautiful curves. Her hair was wet and her face was as tired as before. The dark smudges under her eyes had built their homes there and weren't coming out anytime soon.

"I don't know Mom, all Dad and I felt was that there was something shiny in our room. From then on, all I could feel was my stomach churning. I was also feeling sick until moments ago."

Loreto nodded, the same sensations his daughter described also fitting into what he was feeling earlier.

"I felt something similar too." The woman took the white towel and wrapped it in her hair as she spoke.

"Didn't you say you didn't feel anything?" Loreto frowned.

"I never said that, what I said was maybe it was our stomach. What's more likely to have happened now is that our stomachs are actually the victims of my lasagna." She sighed with regret.

"Are you sure? There was nothing wrong with the lasagna, I think." Judith didn't show an expression different from her father's.

Jessica nodded before saying, "Yeah, it could be that the ingredients I used were out of date. I haven't made lasagna in so long that I haven't even bothered to look at it."

"So it could really be food poisoning. Honey, did you see any bright lights or something similar?" Loreto couldn't undo the contraction in his forehead.

"No, I woke up with my stomach suddenly hurting."

"In that case, let's all go to the hospital. I'll get ready, you two get dressed too. Don't delay choosing the best outfit. We are going to the hospital not the mall-"

"Okay, okay, we understand. Mom, let's go."

Loreto wasted no time and went straight to his closet. When the door to the brown cabinet that stored his clothes was opened, he could see the deplorable amount of his clothes. As for the colors, they ranged from black to black, even movies from the last century had more color variation.

In relation to all this, the man with hair the same color as these fabrics did not mind. His hands went straight to his black jeans and long-sleeved black shirt. In all, it didn't take more than five minutes for him to get dressed.

The two most important women in his life, however, failed to perform at the same level. Judith was ready in 7 minutes, and his wife took three minutes longer than his daughter.

"Hurry up! How can changing some clothes take so long?" His anxious voice landed in deaf ears.

The three people got into the humble white car, but when the garage control in Loreto's hands didn't work, the Esmorte family frowned. After squeezing the control more times, the haired man sighed and gave up on these futile acts.

He opened the car door and got out, going straight to the garage door and opening the metal gate manually.

Inside the car, the two women saw the garage door open and the familiar surroundings of the street on which they lived appear. Or rather, this was the scenario the mother-daughter pair had been waiting for.

"What is that!"

"Oh my God!"

However, both of them widened their eyes when they saw that there was nothing they expected in front of them.

The street? It disappeared.

The houses? Gone.

The city? Same!

In place of all these things, the image that formed within the countless retinas in her eyes was something that could be described as an alien painting, since it was so erratic and meaningless.

There was no earth.

There was no matter.

There was no heaven.

"Mom…"

"This…"

Jessica's hands tightened on Judith's shoulders, causing the latter to look to her mother's face for support. However, these actions proved of little use since when she looked into her mother's blue eyes, something was reflected in them.

It was the reflection of the endless immortal cosmos.

It was the reflection of the glow of countless stars.

It was the reflection of the fascinating reality.

It was the proof that it wasn't a dream!