Flowers

Lavender awoke in a room that was not where she had fallen asleep. It was stange and startling. Though somehow, she thought, oddly familiar though she had never seen it before, at least not with her own eyes. Her minds eye though, felt right at home, for this was the room that she had been envisioning since the age of nine. The room was the perfect blend of soft lavender and white with the occasional yellow accents that seemed connected somewhere in her mind with the flowers she grew up watering. There was everything she wanted in a room, and even some things she didn’t know she wanted but was delighted were present, such as the soft yellow moshroom lamp with small delicate petals on her bedside table, and the huge squishy yellow beanbag in the corner.

Her immediate thought was that she was dreaming, though she didn’t think to pinch herself to check. That was untill she sat back and painfully banged her head on the wall behind her. Immediately, a soft, squishy white headboard descended from the ceiling, as though amending a mistake.

She was not dreaming.

For you can feel no pain in dreams.

Lavender could not make sense of the strange, hardly a predicament, but the… situation that she was in.

She was a 23 year old girl, still in college, and hardly unusual. She had all the usual issues of a college student. Grades, teachers, friends, (or lack there of), et cetera. She didn’t think anything remotely fantastical or book-worthy would happen to her. In fact, the last thing she did think was what to do the next day to impress her parents, for the last thing she heard from another human being that night was her dad grunting his usual, “Could’a done better today.” And her mom’s almost pitying smirk as she left the room after her husband.

A voice suddenly woke Lavender from her thoughts, “Good morning Lavender, and apologies for the minor inconvenience with the headboard, our mistake. It is good to see you are awake. The morning’s events will begin in thirty two minutes with breakfast. You will be expected to be in front of the door then. Dressed and showered. Bathroom on the left, closet, the next door after that. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.”

She did have questions, thousands, her head was spinning with all of the overwhelming thoughts. But the only one she could muster up after a few minutes was, “Who- what- ARE you?”

“I am but a robot. But a helpful one at that. Please get started if you would like to be on time. We have only 28.5 minutes left now.”

Lavender got started as she was told and in only a little bit she was waiting by the door on the right-hand side of the room where she could’ve sworn there had been no door before. She took a deep breath through her nose, noticing for the first time how the room smelled like her old flower pots. Sweet and earthy. She could almost taste the small sweet cucumbers, and the sharp, spicy peppers that she grew before her parents had shut it down…