Down the tunnel

Date: 8/22/2017

It was mom's birthday so she gathered my bro, sis and me to go driving to whatever looked interesting in a handful of brochures she found. None of us were particularly enthused but we found one for a haunted underground reenactment site that we all agreed would be worth checking out. Upon arrival, we parked outside by a red van. Inside was nothing but cement walls and two rough cement escape hatches next to each other on the floor. We opened the largest and climbed down the ladder, putting us next to a blacksmith who was using the smaller hatch for smoke to escape. Staying in character he ignored our presence. We waundered around aimlessly in a place similar to beneath pike place market in Seattle only with very few people. We stopped by a claw machine when Raya saw a humanoid toy cat dressed in flannel that she wanted. The other animals weren't as cute and it was a dollar to play but I went ahead and tried anyways. They reminded me of something. Suddenly I was experiencing something new; I was a young black haired boy celebrating my late mothers birthday alone. My father, with long black hair mourned her downstairs, distracting himself with t.v. praying therapists will figure out soon why I refuse to accept her death. Upstairs I lock myself into my room when my best friend knocks. He's a few years older, middle school age, with blonde hair as short as mine. He wants to come in to play. I get out of bed to check who it is before turning to my very alive mother who was laying by me. She has long wavy red hair and eyes as blue as mine. Upset by the suggestion of company she demands I rejoin her in bed. It's terrifying but my friend is begging. My mom caves to my look of uncertainty and tells me to pull her out from underneath my bed so he can see her too. I only manage to pull her foot out from under my wooden bed frame before I unlocked the door so my friend can join me. He laughs at the site of my mom's foot, the tag certifying her death still on her big toe, thinking I only kept part of her to remember her by. I tell him to help me get her the rest of the way out but when he does, her ghost yells at me not to let him. I begin to yell what she's yelling. Hearing the commotion, my dad races up the stairs to see my friend and I fighting over my mother's corpse. We drop her heavy limp body from surprise, sending her out my bedroom window. We all run outside to see her body by one of my abstract brightly colored toy animals. I pick it up and remember the first time she fell, she broke my fall to save her baby, surrounded by many of my toys I had interpreted as monsters she saved me from. When her body was taken, the toys were disposed of, so i thought the demons had taken her. I "rescued" her and hid her from the "demons" by hiding her body under my bed. This time I knew she was dead as I saw the error in my original thought. This time the demon was just another toy. I came back into myself with my family, winning my sister a toy cat. I got an owl instead and underneath that game was another machine that'd give a story piece or treasure map. I put in another 50 cents and got multiple stories people had left there from other times they've played but didn't collect their prize. From all the times they got lost in their story. This must've been what made it "haunted". Emotionally exhausted, we make our way back out of this underground city and go home.