Page 108 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

I woke to loud creaking and cracking sounds as the ground shook violently beneath my bed. An earthquake?

Vicki screamed from the other room, but I was frozen with fear. Clutching the side of my bed, I scooted to the edge. Just as I was sitting up, a long, thick, green vine burst up through the floor, splintering the wooden floorboards, and continuing straight up and through the roof.

What in the ever-loving fuck was happening?

“This is a nightmare, Maren,” I soothed myself. It had to be a dream. “It’s not real. Just lay down and close your eyes. You’ll wake up soon, and everything will be okay.”

As I laid back down, Vicki continued to scream and I wrapped my pillow around my ears to block out the noise. The vine grew and thickened as more vines sprouted, winding around furniture and clinging to the walls. As I watched, it spread through the entire room before crashing through the closed window, sending glass flying everywhere.

“The seed, you’re having some crazy nightmare because of that damn seed,” I told myself. “First thing in the morning, you’ll dig it up and march it straight back to the castle.”

Glass shattered, wood splintered, and bricks cracked all around me and there was nothing I could do but lie there. It felt like hours until the whole ordeal suddenly stopped and an eerie silence filled the space. I lay still, willing my pounding heart to slow and focusing on taking deep and even breaths. Closing my eyes, I listened for anything that I could focus on, but all of the typical nighttime sounds I used to lull myself to sleep were missing.

I sat up slowly, pulling the pillow from my head as I looked over the edge of the bed. Except for the area around the massive vine that had impaled the house, the floor looked solid and intact.

“Stop being a pussy and get up,” I told myself as my legs refused to move. I pumped myself up enough to get my feet on the floor so I could stand. “There, see. We totally got this.” I took a step and the entire room swayed slightly. “Nope, we don’t got this.”

I jumped back onto the bed and promptly pulled the covers over my head, waiting a full minute before realizing how silly I was being and commencing round two of my self-pep-talk.

“This is a dream; people don’t get hurt in dreams. People get to be brave badasses in dreams!” I reminded myself as I peeked out from under my blanket.

After another minute, I repeated the action of standing and forbid myself from getting back into bed, no matter what happened. “I am badass dream-Maren,” I repeated over and over as I slowly made my way to my closed bedroom door and opened it.

The hall looked a lot like my bedroom, with vines crawling the walls like extra bracers holding everything up and stable despite the faint creaking and swaying under my feet. I saw Vicki’s door and knew I should open it and check on her, but I was forcing this nightmare to be a dream and in dreams you didn’t have to deal with the shitty people in your life.

I ventured carefully down the hall, running my hands over the vines and noticing for the first time that they were covered in dangling pods amidst all of the big green leaves.

“Green beans,” I groaned. “I swear, Arianna, as soon as I wake up, I’m going to dig up the stupid demon bean and hand it straight to Grayson. I hope he spanks you silly for this crazy idea!”

“Maren!” Vicki called out again, but her voice sounded like it was a lot further away than it should have been. I wanted to ignore it, block it out and pretend like it wasn’t there, because if she was there, then that meant one of two things: this was a nightmare, or it was fucking real. If it was a nightmare, things were only going to get worse, and if it was real, then things just got a whole lot scarier.

“It can’t be real.” I laughed, unsure why I was continuing to lie to myself. Why couldn’t it be real? My best friend was a princess with magical powers that single-handedly saved our town from the spell of an evil sea witch. In comparison, this was practically normal and totally possible. No no no. It's not real.

Taking a few steps back down the hall, I made my way to Vicki’s room and slowly opened the door. Her room was gone, well not gone, but broken into what appeared to be four pieces tangled and held in place with thick vines. As I looked over the edge of the broken floorboards, all I could see were vines. There was no way to get from one piece of the room to the other without climbing.

“Maren!” she yelled again, and I had to hold back a laugh when I finally found her.

“Oh, this is definitely a dream,” I whispered as I looked over her predicament. She was wrapped almost fully in the vines and dangling over her bed. Nothing this amazing could be real.

“Maren, what have you done?” she shrieked. “This is your fault, isn’t it? You and that damn garden. You’ve really fucked up this time. Get me down from here this instant!”

I thought for a moment, if this was a dream, then there were no repercussions, and I could say and do whatever I wanted. I smiled and for the first time in over two decades, I stood up for myself.

“You know, Mother,” I said, using the honorific she’d forced on me since childhood, “from the looks of things, you need my help and screaming your poisonous words at me seems really stupid. I’m going to try to figure out what’s happening. You wait here, but I would stay still if I were you. Too much wiggling, and you might fall.”

I closed the door, delighted with her indignant screams of protest and went into explorer mode with a renewed excitement in my step. Being badass dream-Maren was really freakin’ fun.

The rest of the house seemed pretty intact and I couldn’t help but thank karma for doing her due diligence with this dream. If only something like this would happen in real life.

I sighed and went to the front door. As I opened it, I saw a white fog covering the ground and nothing else. I mean nothing save for sky, vines, and the foggy ground cover. It was beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. It was also eerily silent.

Tentatively, I put my foot outside the threshold of the door and tried to feel the ground, but I couldn’t find anything solid. Sitting down, I reached as far as I could with my feet, still nothing.

“Well, what now?” I spoke into the silence.

Karma answered back when, with a jarring jerk and before I could catch on to anything, I was free-falling through the clouds. I didn’t even have time to scream before I found myself tangled in vines and hanging upside down. “Not exactly the answer I was hoping for,” I gritted out, trying to pull myself into an upright position and detangle my leg.

The entire vine shook again and this time my descent was not halted by vines, but by contact with solid ground. Hard. Solid. Ground. Pain shot through my body like an electrical shock and I couldn’t hold back the scream of agony.

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