Another journal

You can find all the sections here.

Emily was standing in front of her aunt’s front door. Her own front door. the weather-beaten wood of the porch creaked beneath her boots as she shifted nervously. Everything looked so much more worn.

She didn’t have her keys—there hadn’t been a reason to take them with her and Emily had been worried about losing them in the wilds of the Sidhe. With a deep breath she rang the bell. Silence stretched out and Emily wondered if Janice was even home. With a start, she remembered the watch she’d packed away some point after realising its uselessness in the Sidhe. She dug through her backpack, hands shaking. Without its magical depths it was stuffed to the gills.

“Hello?” Janice spoke quietly from the stairs. Emily abandoned the bag and turned in a rush to face her aunt. Her heart pulled like taffy. Janice looked so old, bands of grey showing at the roots of her hair and worry lines etched where there’d been only marks of laughter before.

“It’s me! I’m back, I have an answer, did you get my letters?”

Janice stayed on the stairs and Emily stopped mid-step.

“Aunt Janice?” A million things ran through Emily’s head. Maybe this was a different dimension, no that was stupid, fairies were fantasy, not sci-fi. She realised that her aunt’s long hair had been cut to a no-nonsense bob.

Janice cleared her throat, unbelieving. “Emily? You, it’s—oh dammit.” She ran up the steps and crushed her niece in a hug. She said something, but it was thick with tears and Emily pulled back at arms length and asked her to repeat it.

“I said, it’s been ten years Emily. Yes, we got your letters but you’ve been gone a decade.”

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.