Alternate universe anyone?

Here's a short alternate universe piece I wrote for my creative writing class last night. It's kind of fun, so I thought I'd share. I don't normally write alternate universe stories; I prefer to make up worlds completely. This is something new for me, so let me know what you think in your comments below!

Jury Duty Dreams

by Nicole Kapise Perkins

She was gone. Somewhere else completely. She could feel herself: the hard wooden bench beneath her, the knit material of the jacket she wore, the glasses on her face, the headache that had been plaguing her since she woke up. Despite all this, she realized she wasn’t here anymore.

A wind stirred her hair (air conditioning, of course) and before her eyes a rich green sward edged against a dark stone castle’s foundation. You’re looking out the courthouse window, her mind told her. But the courthouse lawn wasn’t ever this luxurious, and Hope Street in all its cracked, frost-heaved, exhaust-ripping, horrible-driving glory and a sidewalk separated the Gothic-style Unitarian Universalist church from the courthouse. So what was she looking at?

She was hallucinating, she realized. That had to be it. The demands of a go-nowhere high-stress job and the sinus infection she had had for a month had finally pushed her over the edge, and she was completely breaking down. She’d wake up tomorrow, back to herself, in a room in the east spoke at the hospital and have to convince everyone that she really was fine; all she needed was a big bottle of DayQuil, a vacation, and a month’s worth of sleep.

Still, wherever she was, it was lovely. Birds were singing, the sun was shining, and all around her was the scent of things green and growing. She hadn’t been so immersed in nature since her last visit to her grandparents’ farm nearly ten years ago. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the warmth. Luxury, plain, simple, pure. She felt better, she suddenly realized. Better than she had in months, really, but certainly better than this last one; she had been on so many prescriptions of antibiotics her doctor had finally given up and told her whatever she had needed to run its course. Drink plenty of fluids, get some rest, and try not to work too hard. Right. She remembered thinking that she’d like to live in whatever world her doctor did, because it was obviously a lovely fantasy place. Apparently she had gotten her wish. Now that she was feeling like herself again (this little psychotic break had done wonders for her) she would open her eyes and be back in the courtroom, sitting waiting for jury duty like the forty-odd other poor souls that had to give up a day of their lives and waste it sitting in a courthouse for eight hours.

She opened her eyes and saw clouds. Beautiful, fluffy white clouds floating across a brilliant blue sky, such a pure shade of turquoise that it brought tears to her eyes. She had never really appreciated the sky before; she never had the time really, to look and revel in the blueness that was the heavens. It was amazing. It was not, however, the courtroom that she was sitting in. Or thought she was sitting in. She had been in a courtroom, not even five minutes ago, and now she was…here. Standing in a meadow amid buttercups and bluebells with orange and crimson butterflies flitting about, fat golden honeybees zipping from flower to flower, and an imposing castle-like edifice looming before her. She turned to look behind her. About a quarter of a mile away was a stand of trees. It might be dense enough to be woods, she couldn’t really tell. It certainly was not the Franklin County Courthouse.

At this point her rational mind was probably curled in fetal position sucking its thumb and whimpering, but her common sense was working well enough to tell her that it might be a good idea to inquire at the castle as to where she was, if not how she got here, and how could she get back where she belonged. If that’s really where you belong, her rational mind sat up enough to pipe in. You’ve been miserable. Do you really want to go back? And then rational mind’s thumb popped back in and it rolled into a ball whimpering once more.

She took a couple steps backward expecting to wake up on a bench in the courthouse utterly mortified for having fallen asleep in front of two dozen people she had never met before, and found that not only was she not in Kansas anymore, relatively speaking, but she wasn’t even in the twenty-first century anymore, if the gray crinoline-skirted dress she was wearing had anything to say about it. She knew her history well enough to recognize the dress of a mid-nineteenth century gentlewoman, but she didn’t know her present well enough to know why she was wearing the dress of a mid-nineteenth century gentlewoman.

Was she in England, then? She knew that only England had such lush green lawns surrounding dauntingly huge buildings as this castle, but how she was in England, when she had been sitting in the courthouse in Greenfield, Massachusetts reading not Jane Eyre, which would explain this lovely, though bizarre, dream, but Penelope Quest’s Reiki for Life, which had absolutely nothing to do with nineteenth century England (or nineteenth century anything, really) was beyond her comprehension.

Standing here musing over her sudden change in attire wasn’t going to get her any answers, so she smoothed her skirts—I always wanted to say that, she thought with a grin—and began walking around the base of the imposing structure searching for a door. She looked up, examining the building as she walked. It wasn’t a castle, she came to realize, but a gigantic manor house, like the one in her favorite film version of Jane Eyre, starring William Hurt; the kind of house that had been built to hold generations of one family. She hoped the owners were friendly. No chance that the owner would actually be William Hurt; that would be asking too much of this hallucination.

She came to the massive double doors of what must have been the outer wall of the manor house. Just like in her movie a smaller door was set within the grand doors that must have opened wide enough to allow vehicles through. She raised a hesitant fist. She really needed to find out where she was, but good lord, how to explain that she had no idea where (or when) she was? Suck it up, Buttercup. She knocked. She could hear the echo on the other side of the door, presumably across a paved courtyard.

She waited patiently. Even if there was someone around it may take them a bit to get to the door. Just as she was thinking she should knock again she heard a bolt slide and the door opened. The woman that opened the door greeted her by name.

“Good morning Miss Anderson. How are you today?”

She blinked. “I’m…sorry?”

“You look well,” the woman continued.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” She surveyed the woman standing before her with growing confusion. Hair tied back, glasses, sensible stud earrings, a surgical mask, wristwatch, stethoscope around her neck…scrubs? What was going on??

She closed her eyes, put a hand to her head. This was too much, too bizarre, too frightening. “Miss Anderson? Miss Anderson, I have your medicine. Let’s sit you up.”

“Where am I?”

The woman’s eyes crinkled in what must have been a smile. “You’re at Franklin Medical Center, Miss Anderson. You collapsed at the courthouse this morning waiting for jury  duty. You have been diagnosed with viral pneumonia. We’re keeping you for a couple days, and you should be ready to go home on Thursday.”

 NKP: 9/11/2019