My Punishment

There is a little creature near my computer. He’s sitting on his hunkers and looking up at me. I must look enormous to him. He’s very slight and bird like. His skin is light blue with pale green speckles all over it, like somebody flicked a paintbrush at him. Raggy tufts of brown hair poke out at random angles from underneath a squashed looking dirty cap and he’s wearing a filthy tunic that looks like it once was blue. On his feet are a pair of battered sandals and I can see his tiny blue toes sticking out. He flashes a grin up at me and I catch a glimpse of a neat row of little green teeth. Slung across his body is a small leather pouch, and now he is rummaging in it, looking for something. Finally he pulls out a small thorn. It must be hollowed out because I can see a golden stopper plugging a hole in its wider end. I can barely hear the pop of the stopper being pulled out. Now he’s pouring something out of the thorn, it looks like tiny grains of something, maybe sand. He starts doing a funny little dance; his matchstick legs and arms are kicking and flailing about and he’s slowly spinning in a circle. Suddenly he stops, whirls around to face me and blows a handful of the thorn sand at me with such force that it gets into my nose and mouth and gets lodged in my eyelashes. Then he’s gone.
I stare at the space where he was just a few minutes before, then I get up to wash the sand out of my eyes and mouth. All day long I think, did I imagine it? Did I just nod off for a few minutes and dream the whole thing? By the time I’m getting ready for bed I’ve convinced myself that I’d made it all up.
All night I dream strange, disturbing dreams. Trains chasing me and being unable to get off the tracks, monsters with white gaping faces crawling all over the walls, splatters of blood and strange sounds of howling and cruel laughter.
In my sleep I feel something tugging, pulling at me from some point behind my eyes, it becomes more and more insistent until finally it wakes me up fully.
Then I see that I’m not in Kansas any more.

I’m in a sort of low cavern. It takes a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the dim light, and when they do, I’m able to make out the shapes of various bits of furniture: a table, some chairs, a dresser and what looks like a stone wash basin. I realise that I’m lying on a raised platform which seems to be used as a makeshift bed and judging by the aches in my back and neck, I’ve been lying there a long time. I sit up fully, promptly wallop my head off the low rocky ceiling and find myself flat out again. Closing my eyes against the stars that are dancing in front of them, I slide off the bed and crumple to the ground, where at least I can sit up straight without incurring further risk of concussion.
Where the hell am I?

A polite little cough alerts me to the presence of someone else. I look down and by my elbow I see a small knobbly man. He looks as though he’s made of tree bark. He opens his mouth and makes a series of rasping sounds, then reaches out and with both hands offers me a miniature goblet full of something frothy and bubbling. I gently take it from him and regard it for a moment. There’s probably about half a thimbleful of liquid in it, minus all the froth, which given my size, couldn’t do me that much harm. Then again the little blue imp had only blown a handful of sand at me, and he was smaller than this knotty old creature. As I sat there going back and forth in my head, the old man by my elbow seems to get more and more impatient until finally he reaches into the folds of the toga he’s wearing and produces a small but very sharp knife. In the blink of an eye, he’s jabbed the knife into a point just above my elbow and pulled it out again. I yelp in pain and once again whack my head off the low ceiling. Decision made. I open my mouth and knock the contents of the goblet to the back of my throat. It doesn’t taste of anything. I glare angrily at the ugly old creature and resist the temptation to flick him to the walls of the cavern with my baby finger. Still nursing the point where he’d stabbed me, I begin to feel strange. My head starts to swim and my eyes refuse to stay open. I’m fighting against it as hard as I can. After all, I have no desire to be unconscious in the same room as a freaky little creature with a penchant for sticking knives in things. But it’s no good, my head weighs so much that I can’t hold it up any longer. It keeps falling forward and at the same time I realise that I’m rapidly losing consciousness. The sounds of the room are becoming more and more distant.
Blackness.

This time when I wake up it’s day. Sunlight filters through a crack in the roof. My head is pounding. I sit up and looking around I manage to see that I’m still in some sort of cavern. I put my hands to my aching head and suddenly it hits me. I’m sitting up! Fully up! I look up at the ceiling and it seems much higher than before. Before I can get any further understanding a voice from the corner of the room makes me jump three feet out of my skin. Slowly I look around. Behind me, sitting on a wooden three legged stool with a piece of cloth and a needle on his lap, is the little blue imp who had flung the thorn sand at me. Except now he wasn’t so little. Bit bigger than me actually, judging my the size of my own tiny hands held up defensively against my face. I realise that I’m still in the same room as before. I carefully climb down from the (really quite high) bed platform, clinging nervously onto the long swathes of bedclothes. I stand still for a moment, not knowing what to do when something makes me look down and I see that I’m completely naked. My face flares red with embarrassment. I frantically grab up some of the trailing bedclothes and hurriedly wrap them around my miniature frame.
I stand there, hot and confused, wishing I would wake up from this nightmare. The voice speaks again. It has the same rasping quality as before but now I can make out some of the words. The imp hops down off the stool and comes towards me, holding out the piece of cloth he had in his lap. With one hand I take it cautiously from him, the other holding tightly onto my makeshift toga. A tunic. I look at him distrustfully. Anything that’s been given to me so far has hurt or done some other damage to me. He gestures at me impatiently and turns his back. I look around to make sure there aren’t any others in the room and quickly pull on the tunic while freeing myself of the bedclothes at the same time. It’s dark green, knee length with short sleeves and made from a soft material I’ve never seen before.
A glimmer from the corner of the room catches my eye and, glancing at the creature who still has his back to me, I curiously make my way over to it. Suddenly I see another one of them. An outlandish thing with two huge amber eyes, a wide curving mouth, no nose, a thatch of rust coloured hair and pale green skin covered in the same splotchy markings, only these were faintly violet.
We regard at each other for a moment. He looks at me, I look at him. Then a movement over his shoulder catches my eye, in the same instant, a scuffling noise behind me makes me jump.
Then it dawns on me. The glimmer had come from a sort of mirror, and that bizarre creature is my own reflection. The blue imp comes closer, and rests one hand on my shoulder as I gaze into the mirror, dumbstruck. I am one of them. How did this happen? Why?
I look at myself through my big cats eyes and start to cry.