On her first day as a teacher Laney Jenkins roamed her classroom and observed her first grade students with pride as they created drawings in chalk, watercolors, colored pencils, and crayons based on a word she’d written on the board: PLAYTIME.  She thought it’d be fun to draw on such a gloomy, overcast day.

Unlike what she’d expected, though, the children created similar drawings and, at first, she wrote this off as copying behavior, not unusual in young children. Still, as the silence in the room grew palpable with only the hum of the air-conditioner and the scrapping of medium to paper to break its completeness, it felt wrong. These pictures were not developing into the cute drawings of first graders, but something else, something that tickled her memory like an insatiable itch.

“What’re you drawing?” She asked a little girl.

The little girl didn’t respond. Laney reached out, but her fingers found only empty space. A bright burst of panic washed through her and she hurried around the room asking the other children the same question, her head swimming and her heart pounding against her ribs. Each had no response. Behind her, the door slammed hard enough to shake the glass in the pane.

She gazed around the room, a scream screwed in the back of her throat that refused to let loose. The frenzied drawing stopped. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing another mirror. Each drawing had the word EXIT in big red letters at the top of the page, an exaggerated red door under that, black and red skies with streaks of lightening crashing to the ground, children standing around the door, and Laney, no mistaking it, with her hand on the doorknob. The drawings were identical in every respect and something nagged her about them.

A low hum like electricity made her hair stand on end and her fillings hurt. The children turned and stared at her, or maybe through her. Lightening crashed outside and the rain poured in a deluge. The lights flickered and died, and the room blinked with bright light like an antique hand-cranked moving picture machine. Drawings rose from their perches and danced through the air, creating a circle. Laney could not move, yet she was moving, pulled toward the drawings. At the center, she stopped, bobbing just above the floor. The drawings began to spin around her until they manifested a single red door. The children held hands and closed their eyes. “Go back,” they chanted.

Laney realized something important in that moment: she had to open that door. She didn’t belong here. She had to go back. Other children needed her. She floated to the door, turned the knob, and opened it. She could see a hospital room and herself lying on a pristine bed. She saw her mother, her husband, and two young children. Without looking back, she floated through.