Week 2: Parboil Individualistic Boloney

[Disclaimer: This story? It has nothing to do with the title, whatsoever! xD]

I was standing on a pure white beach. A beautiful blue sky came down and touched shallow, and stunningly turquoise, water.
“Huh” I eloquently verbalized to myself, and began to walk. The bright sun felt good on my bare shoulders; an excellent change from the frigid temperatures of the dark and dreary Vermont January I had been experiencing lately. I kept walking, moving to where the water lapped the sand in beautiful frothy arcs and letting it course back and forth over my toes. I sighed a happy and contented sigh. I was truly warm for the first time since August.

I laughed and did a little jig, jumping and twirling, and immediately fell flat on my face in the wet sand. Surprised, I giggled a little, and laughed outright, my face still in the sand. Of course, then I pictured what I looked like in my head, a shirtless young man, laying in the wet sand as shallow waves broke around me, laughing like a complete lunatic, and the idea only made the laughing worse. Eventually, I calmed down and looked up. Right into the hugely bulbous nose of an oddly familiar looking golden man. I giggled and realized it was my own reflection, grossly distorted in something... ...brass.

I sat up, excited, as visions of a genie in a lamp flashed before my eyes (for some reason, the idea did not strike me as improbable or impossible) but as I looked at it I realized it was not a lamp at all, but... A tuba. I scratched my head. Shrugging, I picked it up and gave it a gentle rub. Nothing happened so I tried the obvious next thing, and blew into it. A terrible rattling noise came from the horn and when I upend it, a strangely nondescript ring fell out.

I picked it up from the sand and looked at it, this way and that, then slid it on my finger. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, whether I’d turn invisible or into a rock or suddenly feel stronger, but certainly not this weird feeling of utter normality. I picked up the tuba again and continued down the beach, blowing into it and making the oddest noises. I skipped and honked and honked and skipped, and suddenly I was flying and it didn’t make sense at all, but was glorious!

Anyway, that was when I woke up.

Yeah, it was a dream. I was so excited about it too. Oh well. Such is life.

I climbed out of bed and left for the bathroom. It was business as usual until I started brushing my teeth. An unusual gleam of gold in the cabinet behind me caught my eye. I looked over my shoulder to get a better look, but there was nothing gold on the shelf. I shrugged and looked back, continuing to brush and saw it again! A definite gleam from the front of the shelf. I squinted at the mirror, trying to get a better look. It was still unclear. I decided that it must be the way the light was hitting the object and bouncing through the mirror that allowed me to see it, which is why I was unable to see it without the mirror.

Using the mirror as my guide, I carefully stepped backwards and reached for the object on the shelf behind me. I felt my hand close on something, and I stepped back to the mirror and the light to better see it. I opened my hand, and lying on my palm was- an old walnut shell. I blinked. I decided that I must have imagined the glint, and was about to throw the shell away when I glanced in the mirror and gasped.

My reflection was holding, not a dull brown shell, but a shining golden ring. I moved closer and brought the ring in the mirror up to my eyes. There was no mistaking it, it was the same ring from my dream. My jaw fell and I looked at my reflection. The boy in the mirror stared back, but his mouth was firmly closed below mischievously twinkling eyes. My own eyes widened and he just nodded. I tilted my head, perplexed, and he chuckled.

“What the heck?” I said aloud. The boy in the mirror shrugged and put a hand to his ear, signing his inability to hear. I laughed and pointed at his hand, the one holding the ring. He held it up and turned it in the light, admiring it, then looked back at me, teasing. I mimed flying, the way i had in my dream, and he laughed, lifted off the ground and slowly spun end over end in the small room, putting a thumb to his nose and sticking out his tongue. I held up my own hand, containing the walnut, and, on a whim, pressed it against the glass of the mirror. To my surprise, while the glass stopped my fingers, the walnut dropped through to the other side. Starting forward, the boy dropped to the ground and caught the falling nut, a look of panic on his face. He immediately tried to force the nut back through the glass but it stopped just as my fingers had. He groaned, terrified, and looked at the ring on his finger.

Something weird begin to happen. His finger began to stretch, and around the ring, a haze of black and purple particles began to swarm. It looked like the ring was sucking the hand into itself. Scrabbling at his hand, the boy tried to get the ring off his finger, but it was stubbornly stuck. The lights in the room through the mirror began to flicker and dim, and one bulb burst, showering sparks and shards of broken glass.

I watched, horrified at what I had caused, as a gruesome scene began to unfold. The boy had a firm grip on the ring, and was tugging with all his might. His arm stretched and his muscles warped like a cartoon as a black hole formed around the ring, pulling at the fabric of his world, distorting the lines of the room. I thought for sure that he was doomed, but, with an effort born of desperation, he at last managed to claw the ring from his finger. He struggled towards me, carrying the ring which seemed to not want to move from where it had started reacting. I realized, too late, that he was going to force the ring and the ever consuming black hole through to my world!

I panicked and looked around for something with which to smash the mirror. A large metal soap holder sat on the sink, and I snatched it up, swinging it at the window to the collapsing world on the other side. The boy screamed and lunged at me, hand outstretched and the ring at the end of his fingers. In slow motion I watched him suspended in the air, electricity arcing from the ring to the rest of the room. The boy’s face- my own- was full of hate, but was superseded with despair and terror. The metal construction traced its way across the room towards the mirror. Even as it left my hand, I wondered if I was condemning a planet to destruction. The boy and the soap rack hit the mirror at the same time.

The glass shattered and fell away, exposing the wall where it had been hung, but as it fractured, a golden ring shot out and into the sink behind me. I quickly turned and looked, expecting the same black hole, but the ring lay there, completely inert.

I picked it up and examined it closely, wondering what was going on and what had happened to the world in the mirror.