“Suit up” I said to my daughter, “It’s raining cats and dogs outside”.
“Come on mom, we’re gonna be late!” my daughter called from the doorway. It’s her first day of school, and she’s pretty excited.
“Just let me get my keys, do you remember where I put them?” I asked my daughter, who was leaning against the door frame with her pink Hello Kitty backpack sitting on the ground next to her.
“Check the fridge?” she said jokingly with a mild smirk on her face.
I decided to open the fridge door, to humor her. To my surprise, the keys were sitting beside an open can of soda. I secretly picked them out of the fridge, and pretended to find them on the kitchen floor. “Oh, found them!” I yelled to my daughter. “They were on the kitchen floor, beside the chair. Must have dropped them when we had supper last night.” I said with a smile.
A rehearsed line, but I believe I’ve gotten away with this lie.
After I drove my daughter to school, I was asked by her principal if I wanted to look around. I said ‘yes’ without any hesitation. I knew that I would gain more emotional stability out of this tour than my daughter, I needed to make sure that this school would properly attend to her every need.
After the short tour, I’ve come to the conclusion that my daughters new school was a place filled with energetic and enlightened minds. The teachers had an unusually positive view on life, and valued every second they could spend filling the minds of the students with eternal knowledge. Overall, the school provided me with calm and warm feelings.
A whisper of encouraging yet mysterious emotions followed me to my car. The school was perfect, and even though I was taught by my recently deceased mother to judge all things that seem too good to be true, the warm energies transmitted with this heaven-like school were simply too powerful to question.
Upon opening the door to my car, I looked back towards the school. A quiet yet strong sigh escaped from my mouth, and a tear began to form at the corner of my eye. Although I was being soaked by the seemingly unending sheets of rain, I stood beside the open door of my car, unprepared for what I was soon to encounter.
My late mother always told me that whenever the rain falls with intense force, lightning is soon to follow, followed by a storm of which no one could accurately predict. The saying first originated from my great grandmother, who I was informed used to practice some form of illegal witchcraft back in the countryside. Although at the time my great grandmothers supposed visions were believed to be nothing more than an old woman’s crazy nightmare, they have since proven to have some form of real world consequence, as the events depicted in her visions soon occurred in our waken world with seemingly impossible accuracy.
Although none of her supposed visions had any such mention of a school or of my children, I found myself unable to shake away the feeling that something, unknown as to what, is soon to happen.
After around five minutes of thinking heavily in the rain, I decided it was best to finally enter my car, and to drive home.
As I was pulling out of the teachers parking lot, I noticed a bright flash of light appear in my rearview mirror, immediately followed by an enormously loud crack of thunder. The lights illuminating from the nearby houses went dark, soon followed by the streetlights.
I turned around in my seat to witness the school, of which my daughter is currently attending, engulfed in flames. Even though the rain is falling quite rapidly, the flames are still capable of dancing to the wonderful sound of children’s screams with no signs of slowing down. The school will be nothing more than a pile of bone and ash in a matter of minutes, with no one to come to the rescue. I am completely helpless, and incapable of saving the lives of all the souls inside of my daughters school.
All I can do is pray, and hope that someone, somewhere, is listening.