Doorways – Midweek flash fiction challenge

It’s impossible to escape. I haven’t been back in years but still it lurks in every puddle, every river, every stream. You look into the water and you see your reflection, most people do. To most people the other place is locked away, inaccessible. But once you been, it is forever unlocked, even if you want to wall the place up and never look back. Worst part is, if you don’t like a town, move away and you are now further away from it. But this place, no. It follows you. I’ve travelled hundreds of miles since I left but it’s always there, the doorway in the water showing me the other place.

It’s a lot like this world. The only difference is the impossible can happen there. When I’m there, I can do things, things here on Earth we could only dream of. You’d think you’d never want to leave a place where you were magical, but just imagine what else is there. If everything you can dream of is there, everything from your nightmares is too. One day, the nightmares came looking for us, we’d made too many waves. I got away and I’ve never been back. There was nothing for me there anymore. My only friend hadn’t gotten away, I’d waited a week but he never came. He was gone.

It’s hard to forget when you see windows to the place every time you’re near water. It haunts me every day. I try not to look, let me vision go soft and unseeing. But not today. Today I was standing above a puddle staring down at the floor. People walked around me, muttering curses and complaints, assuming I was a lunatic. But they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see him. Four years since I’d left, here he was. The man I’d thought was dead was staring back at me through the puddle, smiling, beckoning me in.

Whatever was going on, this was not going to go well.