LITTLE BOY LOST

”Missing: one frightened little boy. Name: Marky. Description: two years of age, average height and build, light brown hair, quite handsome. Last seen being tucked into bed by his mother a few hours ago. Last heard--aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet put it. For Marky can be heard quite clearly, despite the rather curious fact that he can't be seen at all. Present location? Let's say for the moment--in the Twilight Zone”

I pushed half of my body through the wall of our small trailer on the lake, in a valiant effort to extract our two-year-old son from the parallel universe he had somehow gotten pulled into.
I had half of my body in the hallway of our trailer and the other half was searching an unknown realm, grasping for my child's screams for help in this Twilight Zone nightmare that was all too real.
As I entered this alternate universe I could see my son, suspended in space screaming "TARS, TARS!” pointing straight up. I followed his tiny finger with my unbelieving eyes to a sight unseen too all but a select few who had reached the outer limits of our existence.

To the lower half of my body it was close to four O'clock in the morning. To the half of my body, which could see, hear and think, O'clock had no relevance.
My eyes followed my tiny sons gaze and I like him was completely awestruck at the innumerable amount of stars that were close enough to reach out and grasp without effort.
For a moment thoughts of rescuing my son were replaced by an unworldly desire to join him in this cosmic nirvana, but suddenly the memory of that episode of The Twilight Zone “Little Girl Lost” brought me back to the task at hand, for I knew that this portal of dimensions was a fleeting escape and in mere seconds it would be closing around the midsection of my body leaving half of me in the wilderness of Morgan County and the other half somewhere between white-trash housing and total cosmic consciousness.
I had never known what being totally mesmerized meant until this moment, but that is exactly what I was.
This was not a dream although it took some time to sort out real from the surreal through the fog of a 4:00 A M heart stopping little boy screaming wake up call.
I pulled my gaze back from this time/space continuum and looked down at my son who seemed to be light years distant but still within my grasp. I knew I had microseconds to act; the vortex seemed to be closing around me and the tear in this fabric of space would soon be gone.

 I reached across oceans of stars, black holes and quasars and grabbed my son by the shoulders.
I pulled him back through the now closed wall and we fell back into the hallway.
I sat there holding my son, his eyes still open wide enough to hold all the stars that had held him in trance.
My heart was pounding so hard in my ears I thought at any moment it would give up. The adrenaline was still shooting through my muscles like dull needles.
Finally I started gathering what was left of my wits and began the debriefing process with Marky and myself.
Between both accounts I pieced the events of that night together.
I DVRed my brain and rewound to the point where I was laying in bed in deep slumber.

Suddenly I was awoken by a blood-curdling screen from down the hallway of our small trailer. It was a scream from my son, but not a normal bad dream scream. It was the sound of primal terror of which I had only heard in horror movies.
I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall to the tiny bedroom where my son slept. I turned on the light and looked down at his bed only to find it empty. At that instant I heard that same scream only this time it came from the direction I had just came from, my bedroom. "What the hell?" I ran back to my bedroom expecting to see Marky standing there and wondering how the hell I ran past him. But he was not there!

Then I heard him scream again only this time he seemed to be close enough that I could surely look down and see him. He was not standing where the scream was coming from!  That's when I remembered that episode of the Twilight Zone.
The little girl had fallen though the wall of her bedroom in the middle of the night, her father could hear her, but she was nowhere in sight. He found a portal through the seemingly solid wall and was able to pull her back into this dimension just before the portal closed around his waist.
Now it was happening to me, my son was on the other side of a portal in my hallway.
I took two steps back down the hallway and was standing right next to the screams, but now he was yelling "TARS! TARS!" I looked to my right and I was standing next to the sliding glass doors I had installed to replace the cheaply built dilapidated hallway outside door. We had a full-length curtain in front of the door. I pulled back the curtain and discovered the door was open. I stuck my head through the curtain and saw my son standing right below me pointing up at the night sky crying "tars! tars!".

We had moved our 10' by 50' piece of shit house trailer to a beautiful piece of land on a lake that our church owned while we saved for a place of our own.
We took care of the grounds and lived there for free for two years until we bought 10 acres of land close by and put a house on it.
I loved living out there in the wilderness of Morgan County. Where the nights were so dark you could stare at the evening sky and clearly make out the outline of the Milky Way. That night in question was a clear moonless night and with eyes fully dilated from hours of sleep me and my young son were awestruck by the beauty of our local galaxy.

How we came to be stargazing at 4:00AM we attributed to little Marky sleepwalking and somehow removing the piece of wood that is the standard hillbilly locking apparatus of choice for a used sliding glass door with a broken lock.
He pulled back the curtain and opened the door, walked out and stood on the stack of firewood that was there where a porch should have been.
Did I mention we lived on a lake
Did I mention we lived in the wilderness of Morgan County?
Apparently he snapped out of his sleepwalking after he stepped through the door and had no idea just where the hell he was. The only thing he could see was the brilliant display of stars.
When all the excitement was over. I didn't sleep very well knowing what could have happened had Marky extended his somnambulic adventure to the woods or even worse, the lake!
I knew there would be a full review of security procedures that I would have to face the next day.
It was the weirdness of the situation I couldn't get out of my mind that night. That episode of the Twilight Zone that had always been one of my favorites and now I had lived my own version of if here on a little piece of nowhere 15 miles from Martinsville the "Gateway to Southern Indiana".

I could almost see Rod Serling standing against the wall of my trailer with cigarette in hand saying.

"Submitted for your approval,
imagine if you will;  if you took one sleepwalking little boy living in Nowhere U.S.A. with stars in his eyes,
add one sliding glass door that should have been secured with something a little more substantial than a wooden stick.
And this equation would equal a husband that's about to catch a ration of shit.
Here somewhere just due south of…the Twilight Zone.
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