I didn't like the sound of what the fairy godmother was telling Russell and me. I wasn't ready to know what it's like to be undead. I was barely getting used to what it means to be an alive human being. But I wanted our children to know how much we missed them back with their family. Who really loves and cares for them. I couldn't let them stay unhappily undead for the rest of their miserable lives in the graveyard.
I gazed into the fairy godmother's crystal ball on the floating table in the middle of my two son's bedrooms. "They have to get out of there, alive!" I screamed, pointing a shaky, nervous bony finger at the glowing crystal ball on the floating table.
The fairy godmother just let out crude laughter and wiped watery tears from her eyes. "You seem worried they are going to be stuck being undead zombies to walk the earth, forever, dear," she said, still laughing. The stout, elderly fairy godmother, adjusted her rainbow-colored turban she wore on her scrunched-up red hair in a bun.
She sneezed a glob of snot on her glowing crystal ball. Making the ball roll off the wobbly, floating table with a white, cotton cloth covering it onto the floor. It shattered into small, sharp, broken pieces of glass. It spilled some thick slime from inside of the crystal ball on the floor, next to the floating table. Suddenly, the wobbly floating table dropped to the carpeted floor. Almost smashing all of our little toes.
Tossing the table aside, it rolled to its side as we all started hoping up and down on our feet in agony. Suddenly, the fairy godmother hollered at the top of her lungs. Trying to grab my husband and myself's attention.
"I can help make this get better," she told us, matter of fact. The fairy godmother fluttered her little wings in the air and hovered above the crashed table next to Mark and Valentino's unmade beds.
Russell and I turned to look at each other. Then, we both turned to the fairy godmother's attention. She snapped her fingers and disappeared in a blink of light. The turned-over table and white cotton tablecloth and broken crystal ball also vanished into thin air, right before our very eyes.
"I can't believe her," Russell said, angrily. "She ditched us. And took our kids somewhere against their will. Never to come back home with us," Russell said, sadly. I wanted to tell Russell he was right. I knew he must be so scared our kids are in the graveyard, not feeling welcomed in the midst of a supernatural ghost.
"There's nothing we can do right now, Russell, dear," I said, reassuringly. Lightning flashed outside the closed draped window of our boy's bedroom window. We heard some childlike laughter echoing throughout the dead of night.
Russell and I exchanged worried looks. "The children!" We both cried out. Turning to hurry to look out the bedroom window, Russell and I parted the draped curtained window and peered out the back yard, where their window was facing.
We saw two kids, staggering in the backyard. Their clothes were shredded and worn and they wore sandals and looked hurt and lost. "How did you kids get back here?" Russell shouted at them. The two children, who seemed like they were ours, Mark and Valentino, suddenly hid behind the big, oak tree in our backyard.
"Don't be scared of us, children," I called out to them. "Come on back inside the house, where you belong," I said, trying to comfort them. I don't know where they've both been. But they both seemed so scared and covered in dirt stains. We watched from their bedroom window as the two frightened children poked their heads around our large, dead, oak tree in the backyard.
"How-how did we get here?" I overheard one of the startled, and scared kids, ask their father and myself from the window. It was Mark who spoke up first. Valentino cowered behind his brother and wasn't sure they were welcomed home after what they've been through.
We didn't want to scare the kids anymore. "Come home, children," Russell called after them. "We can make hot chocolate with mini marshmallows for you," Russell said. "You belong with your parents to take care of yourself," he continued.
Suddenly, we watched from our window. There was the sound of black, birds cawing from the dead oak tree. They flocked from the tree, making Mark and Valentino scream and stagger away from the tree in the backyard.
Trying to grab my children's attention, they had already staggered away from the house. Heading into the dark of the night. Where they would not belong anywhere else.