Hello my peeps! Today, you get an incomplete story. Well, it’s complete, it just has room for more. *waves hand dismissively* You’ll understand once you read it. Enjoy, and let me know if you write your own thing off of the prompt!!
Prompt
Every baby is taken by the government and returned when they are ten years old. No one remembers what happened in those ten years, but they always recognize their parents. However, you remembered everything, and those weren’t your parents. Include the word: Mist
Story
A boy awoke in a room brightened by the light of early day. Denim curtains had slipped and were no longer completely covering the window opposite him. Grunting, the boy blinked the fog away from his eyes and raised himself up on one elbow.
The room was small but not tiny. A dresser stood against one wall with pictures scattered across the top. Next to it was a desk, small but tidy. A door probably led to a walk-in closet or bathroom, a thick book rested atop a nightstand, and a rug that matched the curtains decorated the floor.
What? The boy’s mind was too groggy to figure out what had happened. Everything was concealed by a veil of mist that obscured anything and everything – everything, that is, except for two facts. One: he was a ten-year-old boy named Kayden. Two: he had been returned to his parents.
That didn’t make any sense. Why would he have been “returned”?
Maybe he’d had an accident that had erased all his memories and he’d just gotten dropped off by the ambulance or something. But wouldn’t his parents have just picked him up?
Maybe he’d gotten lost and someone had accidentally hit him on the head, ending up in a concussion that stole away everything he remembered. Then they had returned him to his house. But why wouldn’t his parents have been there, and how would a random stranger know where he lived? Why wouldn’t they have just taken him to the hospital?
Maybe he’d been kidnapped and the kidnappers had brought him back after wiping his memory slate clean. Nah, that was ridiculous.
Kayden stretched and slowly got out of bed. The carpet felt cold to his bare feet as he padded to the window and looked outside. A grin stole over his face.
Snow!
Piled in four-foot drifts, covering the recently-shoveled driveway, falling in large fluffy flakes from the grey sky. Snow everywhere. Kayden barely restrained his squeal. When was the last time he had played in snow? Or made a snowman?
Suddenly he stumbled away from the window as memories flooded back in. A woman’s stern face. A man in a suit smoothing Kayden’s hair. Three other children Kayden’s age playing in the snow with him. Their wishes to have permanent families instead of the temporary homes they kept getting switched around in. Their excitement when they were told that the day they turned ten they got to go back to their parents. Their sadness as Kayden, the oldest, boarded a train with the man in the suit to get his family back. The midnight ride. The blue house. The warm bed. The sweet drink he had to chug before he could sleep and the fuzziness it produced in his brain.
Shaking his head, Kayden backed away from the window and bumped into the foot of his bed. Sweat plastered his blonde hair to his forehead. What?
A soft tap at the door reminded him he wasn’t alone in this house. “Come in,” he called, his voice somehow squeakier than normal.
The door creaked open, revealing the face of a younger woman with her brunette waves twisted into a neat bun. When she smiled at him, her brown eyes sparkled. The best part was that her face was so warm and… familiar. Unlike everything else.
Mom. He knew it was her.
“Good morning, son,” she said, coming over and giving him a quick hug. He smelled cinnamon.
“What time is it?” he asked through a yawn.
“Seven-thirty,” she answered. “Breakfast is on the table.”
He groaned. “Oatmeal again?”
Surprise flitted across her features before she concealed it. “No, dear, not oatmeal. Pancakes.”
“Oh.” He’d always had oatmeal with the stern-faced woman in his memories. Which reminded him…
“Where’s Miss Kayla?”
“Miss Kayla?” Mom repeated, confusion furrowing her brow. Was he imagining the fear in her brown eyes? “You don’t know a Miss Kayla.”
Kayden frowned. “Sure I do! She and the man in the suit brought me here last night.”
Forcing a laugh, his mother ruffled his hair and stood. “I think you had a dream, Kayden. Get dressed and come downstairs.”
“Yes ma’am,” he mumbled, watching her as she exited the room and closed the door behind her.
As he pulled a random pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt from his dresser, Kayden thought about the memories he was slowly getting back piece by piece. He remembered most of it now. But the one thing that bugged him most was not that he had been raised by several different couples and had to go to a weird school where he was asked a lot of random questions and had to eat a lot of stuff. It was not that he’d never had a friend for more than three months before their “situations” were changed. It was not that his mother seemed so worried when he mentioned Miss Kayla or that he could hear her on the phone in the other room right now talking about “medicine” that “didn’t work” and how it might be “time to take more drastic measures”. He didn’t know what drastic meant, but it sounded bad.
No, the thing that bugged ten-year-old Kayden was that he knew something he knew he wasn’t supposed to know. Something that made the rest of his memories look dark and threatening.
His parents weren’t his parents.
Wrap Up
There you have it!! *evil laughter* That poor kid got subjected to being an author’s character. 😉 What do you think? Where would this lead? Why was Kayden “returned” to people who weren’t his parents? Who is Miss Kayla and the man in the suit? Is this set on Earth?
*raises eyebrows at you*
So now it’s your turn! Tell me what you think will happen to Kayden, and remember…
Take courage, pursue God, and smile while you still have teeth! 😉
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