Showing posts with label lights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lights. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Rivi- Tangled in Christmas Lights- Short Story

tangled christmas lights
photo credit: bloomgal via photopin cc
A Christmas Mini Story
Featuring the characters from The Alien Mind

Every year I set up our family Christmas decorations the weekend after Thanksgiving. I had just climbed into my attic to drag down the Christmas boxes when I heard the familiar chime of our door alarm. My heart stopped. The door was supposed to be locked, I'd checked it just moments ago!

Thoughts raced through my mind of my three yr old playing Tron on the Wii in his room. I looked around for something in the attic I could snatch up to use as a weapon.

Plastic driveway candy cane? Eh, seems decently hard enough.

"V.L.? Why are you in your ceiling?"
Ugh, I'm still not quite used to the name change! But wait! What's SHE doing here?! She's not even supposed to exist!
"Um- Rivi, is that you? How did you get in here?" I ask, hanging my head through the open attic door.
"I can manipulate matter remember? I just flipped the inside of the lock. I did try ringing your doorbell first." Rivi answered quickly.
By this point I had recovered sufficiently enough from the shock that I was ready to play along with whatever delusion was playing out in my head.
"Oh yeah, I forgot- we still don't have that fixed yet." I grabbed one of the smaller boxes from the top of the decoration boxes stack and dropped it through the attic door, "Catch!"
Rivi caught the box by levitating it mid air and lowered it carefully to the ground.
"Weren't you afraid of breaking the ornaments in there?" Rivi asked. "I mean, I caught them, but what if I hadn't?"
I shrugged before I realized she couldn't see me from down there.
"That one is just a bunch of tangled Christmas lights." I answered.
"Christmas lights?"
"You've never seen Christmas lights? Hold on! You'll love this!" I answered while crawling back over to the attic ladder.
Once I made it down I pulled out the wad of Christmas lights and stuck the outlet end into the wall.

"Oh WOW neat!" Rivi exclaimed as the wad of wire and tiny bulbs lit up in multiple colors. "Want me to untangle them for you?"
"You can try if you'd like. I'll go get the rest of the boxes."
Rivi held her hands over the tangled ball of lights and levitated them off the floor. Back and forth she waved her hands around the ball loosening it little by little. I climbed down the ladder with the second box and looked around for Rivi... she wasn't in the hallway any longer.

Now, my house isn't very big so I didn't have to look far to see her standing in the middle of the living room with a ginormous moving web of lights over her head. She'd loosened the ball, that's for sure but now it was just an even larger unmanageable mess!

"Rivi- Wait!"
"I've got this," She said, "Um, wait, no, Oh NO!"
Rivi lost control of just a few pieces of the unwieldy web and suddenly it came crashing down all around her entangling her in the middle. Lights were everywhere, both of my cats freaked out. One cat darted off down the hallway and the other arched its back and hissed like Rivi was something that now needed to be pounced on.

I couldn't help it, I laughed and laughed and laughed.

"Not funny," Rivi said glumly blowing her hair out of her face from under the tangled web of lights.

"Next time it might help to unplug the strand before trying to unravel them!" I said still laughing.

"I'm sure your system of storing lights could use some improvement too!" Rivi said with a motion toward the box the lights had been unceremoniously shoved into the year before.

She has a point...


***

Hope you enjoyed this little holiday scene- I plan on inviting more of my other characters over for my holiday party this year so don't be afraid to come on over and join the fun!

While we are at it- what is your favorite way of storing those strands of Christmas lights... does your method keep them from getting tangled?

***



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