My eyes betrayed me. They would not allow me to sleep. Usually, I could float into a psychological scene of my own making, but this time, the darkness surrounded me. The fear was mounting because what is unseen is unknown and what is unknown permits your mind to wander and when your mind wanders, it steers towards the negative and when your mind is bent on the negative it then creates the worst case scenario, death…and THAT is frightening. “Hello”, I gently utter after I hear a creek from the floor. Nothing.

  I carry on in my definite state of alertness for 15 whole minutes, nonetheless, my steely awareness soon gave way to my overbearing exhaustion, as my eyelids start to frequently shade my vision. I feel rest headed in my direction, until…

WHOOP BANG! “Get up, you’re coming with me!”, a strong voice proclaimed.

  My dungeon door flung open with enough force to adhere me to the wall as well as the dirt that covered it. A massive figure approached me from the doorway, a fervent grip met my right arm and I was towed into another dingy little space where I’m instructed to clean up. After I’ve expunged my body of grime under duress, the big man (hovering over me like impending doom itself) will not allow me to escape his fastidious grasp. He coerced me into an even larger expanse with others who were my size. They were not giants, I thought. Even though my panic started to ramp up exponentially from mind movies of us being murdered by these over-sized beings, I did possess a feeling of comfort derived from being in company with those like me. It’s a good feeling, not being alone. After being “encouraged” to complete our unrecognizable meal, it was time to journey out of this castle of slavery into the Real World.

   It was time for our excursion into the cursed Earth. Conversely, all of us made it back from the real world, but not without some fights, scars, and blood during the exploration. Our masters transport us in these carriages that rock back and forth. From our restrained position, we can see the sky, but nothing else. It’s exciting actually, the rush does make me feel alive. Many times I had departed my palace of servitude, but it was always better than the alternative, the Real World. The very heart beating inside my chest to keep me alive was close to bursting every time we ventured out of the confines of the familiar. Our conveyance stopped, soon the giants will be coming to let us out into the wild. As the behemoths revealed us to the light, it attacked us with relentless power. The rays were stifling, the heat was blistering, and the humidity was suffocating. I could see others of our stature being wrangled and beaten into submission. Was there no end…no salvation? It wasn’t so much the cursed Earth that struck me with trepidation, but it was the other monstrous things.

  You see, there were more of them. Endless masses of giants! Thousands, millions, billions of them occupying the land. They spoke in words that confused us, and seemed to whisper among each other…about us! Were we going to die, more severe beatings and manual work, what? I don’t know what fate had in store, but I knew each of us had these Goliaths as protectors. I couldn’t understand at first, but as time wore on, some of the secret language start to resonate, but not much. The one thing the colossal aliens had in common was a term they keep calling each other…

P-A-R-E-N-T-S.

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