Incident at a Crossroads 
By Giovanni V. Crisan

The event at the crossroad of Bentley and Wryvern will forever haunt me as the most horrific in my existence. I had departed my job at Fiersen Pharmaceuticals and continued on the usual 2-hour ride that washed me with twilight through a lonely, two-way street that typically. 

It was on that day that a cosmic event, a light and wind and heat and rain crashed into my trusty gold '89 Buick. I usually drove with the windows down in the summer, and this day was no exception. As I rushed to manually close my window and that of the passenger side, I lost control and spun out - then the sky went black. 

I took the keys and stepped out with the flashlight from my glove box and circled the car to check for damage. Then it came. 

At first I felt fear; a horror unimaginable, of tales told to children to keep them all in line. I felt a hairy thing in my hand, and looked down with hesitant anticipation. 

No longer keys, I held in my grasp a small creature with eyes wide as the oceans and the grin of a jackal. With trembling hands I dropped it and gasped at the next realization. 

My hands, once young and powerful, were now withered and gnarled; my feet, talons of deadly obsidian; my car, an unrecognizable shape of twisted metal and mismatched paint.

Fury engulfed my every pore; sweat and heat blanketed my form and brought me to my knees. The sky was now a pale green, and the wind was bitter cold in its ebb and inhumanly hot in its flow. 

That's when I came to realize that I was now waking to my true reality, waking from my own idealized world of madness. The life that I'd been living and all that I had known before this was just a nightmare.