Northern_Lights_2021

11 As I gazed across the abyss that was my bedroom floor, I could see a million possibilities. While I might have only been staring at a blank wall ten feet in front of me, my imagination drifted. What could be beyond the wall? Or even, what could be in front of it? I looked down at the makeshift bridge. It bowed heavily in the middle. I turned to my sister as she asked, “Is it safe to cross?” “Of course, it is,” I replied. “The bridge is a mattress; it couldn’t be safer.” While the mattress led to nowhere in particular, to us it was an entrance. An opening to anything we could dream of. I looked down at the box spring we were standing on. My bed was no longer a bed. The sheets had become our capes. My pillows had become our weapons. The headboard was now the hull of the ship and we had drifted into the port of the space we had created. I took a step onto the cushion bridge. The edge of the mattress slipped out of place. It touched the floor and I pulled my foot back. “Stop, we have to fix it again,” I said to my sister. “Why can’t we just go?” she complained. “Because that’s not how it works. We don’t want to have no way of getting back.” We hopped off the box spring and onto the carpet. The floor was cluttered with extra pillows and some of the toys that we had been playing with. I kicked them to the side, so we had some room to reconstruct the bridge. “Okay, lift.” We grabbed onto the mattress and lifted it into place between our beds once more. Again, it bowed in the middle, but we didn’t care. As long as the edges didn’t detach from the ship, it didn’t matter. We leaped back onto the ship in a single bound, feeling like superheroes. We posed for a moment, looking like we were on top of the world. My sister giggled as she broke her position, almost mocking its purpose. Then, we turned around to face the bridge again. “Go!” I yelled. We both sprinted across the bridge and jumped into the unknown. Our feet touched down on the steel ground, making a loud bang that echoed through the warzone of a room. We were in a big landing strip, now destroyed by infiltrating ships. There were soldiers in many different uniforms aiming at each other. There was a field of lasers firing through the air, destroying everything around. I looked over at my sister. Her cape was flapping behind her, and her sword had a shimmer of fire around it. “You ready?” I asked excitedly. “Absolutely,” she replied. She lifted her sword and held it out to me. I lifted my sword, now sparking with lightning, and clashed it with hers. We grinned and ran through the battlefield towards the building where our enemy was hiding out. We could see the tower in the distance. The roof ’s edges were blazing, its fiery rim visible from the ground. I turned my attention to the soldiers firing at us. Deflecting the laser shots back at some of the soldiers was amazing. We would swing our swords and bat them back in the direction they came from. I was only being targeted by red lasers. I looked over and saw that she was only getting the chance to deflect blue lasers. I shook it off as a coincidence and focused on the mission. A Bridge betweenWorlds Ethan Kurtz