DARKNESS AND LIGHT

I'm in Oz ! where is my magic slippers.

00:01:59

00:01:58

00:01:57

Tom watched the countdown near zero.

Confusion settling in, he dipped his hand in his trouser looking for his pack of cigarettes, found his pocket empty, then he remember he had quit smoking a month ago. Wondering why he never misses nicotine until this moment.

His throat is dried and he needs water, this chemical beside him looked unsettlingly like a time bomb.

Tom stood abruptly, walked a little distance from the canister.

His breath now racing, he is afraid, worst, he is more afraid to admit this.

Yet he hardly gets scared, not since his childhood.

When he was young, each tragedy either real or fiction always made him sad, rendering him unstable. He grew up in a broken home, his mum had moved out from his dad a few months after five years of bad union. The reasons were unknown to him as he was too young to understand, he was just a year old.

It was a relive for both parties when their divorce finally came through a year later.

He was ruled to stay with his mum until eighteen years when he is old enough to make his decision.

His mum remarried a few months later and that was the beginning of his suffering.

He was used to serving his half-siblings. His stepfather has a way of reminding him how unwanted he is with a proverb of a butterfly who lives with birds and now thinks it's a bird.

The cruel man who promised to treat him as his child had turned into a child molester and his poor mum could not be able to stop him, fearing another divorce and the social stigma associated with it. Then when he was ten years old, tragedy struck, his mum had a car accident and die.

He immediately knew his stay inside his stepdad's house will expire the day his mum was buried. Without waiting for any notice, he packed his bag and sneaked out immediately after the burial.

With the little information he has gathered about his dad, he went in search of him.

His journey was risky as expected for a ten years old boy but he succeeded against all odds,

meeting his father after Nine years of separation.

Then life has a shock awaiting him, his father doesn't want him either.

He had remarried and kept his past a secret from his rich wife. Unwanted Tom had to learn how to protect and fend for himself from the tender age of ten...

Suddenly he heard an alarming bleep. zero hours. Nothing happens. Grinning with his hand on his drumming chest, not a bomb, Shakau won't endanger him.

He looked up, saw a mist gathering, the type that occurs in early harmattan morning. This is strange he thought. looking with rapt attention.

The mist seemed to be accelerating towards him now, with a speed of light the mist covered the distance between them.

The room seemed like an alien world

" I'm in oz, where are my magic slippers? " Tom shouted at nobody.

Immediately, he raced headlong down a precipitous grade where any misplaced step could mean a deadly fall, yet the mist followed, bent on consuming him.

No chance of escaping this deadly doom, not through this step anyway.

When he saw another option in a flash, denied of the chance to reason, to choose between the devil and the red Sea.

It's too late for regret, the glass shattered, cutting him in various parts as he plummeted towards the ground. Tom felt something he never felt before, a strange experience- the inexorable pull of gravity during a dead drop- the faster he fell, the harder the earth pull, sucking him. He fell like a rock, feet first, arms raised.

Violently the wind tore past.

Tom had no doubt he was moving too fast to survive the fall, the unbelievable fall of fifty-storey buildings.

He would be crushed when he hit the ground.

Beneath him, the light of Asum rock spread out in all directions. perhaps this will be the last light he will see. He prayed, first for a miracle to survive the crash, unconvinced, he prayed for his soul to make heaven.

Darkness came rushing beneath him, there was an impact as his body plummeted into the swimming pool in the middle of the villa.

Tom was no longer falling, there was no more terror, no pain nor memory.

Not even the sound of the racing wind nor the soft sound of the lapping water.

A paradoxox of self-awareness set in, this is death, he felt glad for it. Allowing the drifting numbness to possess entirely, carrying him wherever it chooses.

His pains, terror, and fears, all anesthetized and he never wanted them back, not for any price.

"Take me." He begged.

But the lapping that put in him a high sense of peace and harmony seemed to be pulling him back, awakening from a horrid nightmare.

No, let me be!.

He did not want to awaken.

Coming alive is living in hell again as pain exploded all over his body and thundering sound hammering in his ears.

"I'm unbelievably alive," Tom muttered.

Is clothes were torn and sticky with blood.

The pool water had turned crimson and a gnawing ache puked through his head.

He crawl his way out of the pool getting sicklier, wiping his face with a handful of tissues he snatched with shaking hands from the holder built into the side of the counter.

A nasty gash stood on the front of his head and blood gushed out in torrent from it, blinding him and making his crawling more difficult. The pain was relentless, pounding at him like repeated blows from a sledgehammer.

He tried to raise himself to his feet by clutching the stairs rim on the side of the counter, after several miserable failures, each of which made it that much harder to try again, he succeeded.

The mirror beside the pool presented him with another shock; he looked like something out of a teenage slasher movie.

He almost screamed when he saw himself, if only he had the strength. He leaned forward, peered at his eyes trying to remember the sign of concussion.

Something about the pupils bigger or smaller, or one big and the other small? He gave up.

A trail of crimson marked the door frame and the walls and finally, it spreads on the tarmac with slow and agonizing steps, he made his way to the telephone on the stand. He nearly fainted before he could stab a bloody finger at the emergency number.

"Yes, how may I be of help?" Chimed a friendly female voice.

He closed his eyes, one arm clutched on the cut in his stomach where his intestine seemed to be sticking out.

"I need an ambulance."

He saw the phone slipping from his hand, clattering to the floor,

He lost his grip and fell, hitting his head on the phone on the floor.

"hello."

He heard the operator calling from the floor somewhere.

"Help me!" He said.

He had no idea if she heard or not as he started to cry.

The emergency mode transport arrived, he saw them pushing their way through a crowd of horrified police blocking the doorway. Medical things started happening, he was placed on a gurney and an IV was started.

The rest was mostly a blur.

He knew he was wheeled through the lobby and remembered the flashing red light dancing on the top of the ambulance.

Darkness returned as he heard the shrieking siren.