The freezing cold bit at my exposed hands as I knocked the snow off of my car. I was too lazy to use the scraper my dad had provided. Instead, I had grabbed the broom from my pantry and began to sweep my car, starting at the top and hastily working my way around the shiny red automobile. I took a lot of pride in my car – probably a little too much. ‘I didn’t have a car until I was 20!’ was what my mom always said, and this was my second.

The early morning sun was rising in the east and a piercing reflection of light from my driver-side mirror caught my attention. For a moment, I stared into the glinting reflection and saw myself in all my glory.

A kid with a broom. Damn. I thought to myself as I felt the familiar cold touch of my door handle accompanied by a metallic click and a low groan of a cold car door opening in the winter. I slid into my seat and reached around the steering wheel for my ignition. A slight turn of the hand and the dormant beast came to life with a purring sound resembling that of my cat.

A shiver found its was up my spine as I blew white breath onto my numb hands. I remembered laughing with my friends on cold winter days like this one in 2^nd grade while we pretended to smoke cigarettes on the playground, blowing out huge clouds of frosty breath and saying ‘Ah, that hit the spot.’ I wondered for an instant if that had anything to do with my current addiction and decided against thinking about for too long. Which answered my question.

I hated a cold car worse than anything and with my free hand I found the climate control and cranked it as far to the right as it would go to summon the blessed heat. Instead, I was met with a cold blast to the face accompanied by the loud whirling of the fans. I scrambled for the ‘floor’ button, easily located with its stick figure and an arrow pointing to his feet. The cold air immediately stopped blowing in my eyes but the fan hummed on.

My door was still open because of the long, yellow broom that I held in my left hand, the wet bristles buried in the white snow as an ostrich buries his head in the sand.

"Back inside with you," I murmured to the ostrich, swinging my legs outside the vehicle and forcing myself to stand up. The crunching of snow beneath my feet was reassuring as I trudged towards my house.

For one reason or another my door handle was obsolete and a tough crack from my shoulder swung the door inward. The stomping of my shoes against the rug was like an ancient drum beat and I continued it long after they were clear of all snow.

Feeling a bit childish I propped the broom against a pantry wall and plodded back to my kitchen. After pouring myself a glass of orange juice from the fridge I sank into a hard kitchen chair, placing my legs on the chair next to me and setting the glass on the wooden table. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to school and, even worse, dreaded the twenty-minute drive it took to get there.

The juice was sweet in my morning mouth and I swished it around a bit before downing the rest in giant gulp. I let out a long ‘ahhh...’ and tilted my head backwards until I was staring at the ceiling. The seemingly never-ending white was a bit too depressing for me so got up to place my glass in the sink.

A glance at the black, smooth microwave read 8 o’ clock and I grabbed my bookbag, tossed it over my shoulders and headed into the chilly January air. An icy breeze played at my face and my pulled my big down jacket up around my head as I hustled toward my car.

My car! Where was it! I could’ve sworn I had just started it, just finished brushing the snow off and wasn’t it right goddam right here two goddam seconds ago, goddamit!? Swearing furiously to myself I stared at the white snow that used to be my red car.

Swearing even more furiously I turned around and headed back into my house, and with a loud ‘GODDAMIT!’ I slammed the door behind me. Once inside, I threw my bookbag across two rooms and with a THUNK it landed against my living room wall.

"GODDAMIT!"

I ran downstairs to use the phone but halfway down the steps I saw the second oddity of the morning: my cats were all staring at me at the bottom of the stairs. Now, I have four cats, which I all love dearly and admit that they’re all kinda strange, but they’ve never, I repeat, never, all stood in a perfect row and stared at me in such a manner.

A little bit creeped out but too pissed off to think about it, I started back down the steps with thoughts of some chowder head driving my car down the highway burning in my mind.

"Mark." The voice froze me dead in my tracks. Not because my name was said, or even because I recognized the voice, but because it had come from cat, Merlin. I looked around to make sure I was alone, looked at my cats still standing in a row, glanced around one more time and then closed my eyes.

"Mark!" My eyes popped open towards the voice, towards my cats and I saw that Merlin had taken a step towards me. I took a step back.

"Your time has come, Mark."

Rambling incoherently I slumped against the hand rail and drunkenly pointed behind me towards where my car should’ve been as if I to explain to my cat that I was just going about my business and that if he could just leave me sane I’d be a happy camper, car or no car.

Either he didn’t understand me or didn’t care as he lifted himself onto his two back legs and took another step toward me. I tried to take another step back but my legs would no longer support me and I tumbled to the ground, banging my head on the hard top step. "Goddamit!" was the first understandable thing I said since my cat had learned to talk, or at least talk to me.

I laid there, crumpled into a ball with my hands over my face, for a good couple of minutes turning things over in my head. That’s what I told myself. In reality, which quickly seemed to be losing touch with me, I was hoping that when I opened my eyes my cats would be gone. Or say ‘meow’ like they were supposed to or something.

Merlin was a large black and white cat well in excess of twenty pounds that we had picked up outside of a grocery store in Florida, feeling sorry for the poor scrawny kitten. Now, he had this huge "fat bag" that swung between his two back feet as he walked and my brother and I always joked that it was either to make up for his skinny childhood or to be sure that he survived the next nuclear war.

No jokes about my cat’s weight came to mind as he steadily marched towards me and placed his paw on my sore forehead.

"Molly," Merlin was speaking again but this time to Molly, a tiny, purebred Burmese whose sleek brown fur had always reminded me of an otter. I glanced at Molly whom reassuringly was still on all fours and then back to Merlin.

"What… who… how can you…" I mumbled until a quiet "shh…" from Merlin silenced me.

"Yes sir," a high-pitched, scratchy voice had just come from Molly! I started clawing at the top step to try and help myself up, get out of here, anything to get away from this insanity until I saw the wart on Molly’s forehead begin to glow a chilling red, then a bright blue and suddenly my head was no longer in pain.

That wart! What had she just done to me? My sweaty palm found my eye sockets and tried to rub the images out of my mind.

"What…what… what the heck was that?" I finally managed to say.

"It will all be explained in time, Mark," Merlin began again, his deep voice out of place in his cat-body, "for now, we must get you to the other side, our side."

"Y-Your side?" I blurted, now steadily pinching my arm in a drastic effort to wake myself up from this horribly real dream.

"Is there something wrong with your arm?" Merlin asked warmly, his golden eyes tracing the veins in my forearm. "Molly, could you pl-"

"No!" I shouted. I would do just about anything to avoid watching my cat’s wart start glowing different colors again. "Just an itch," I lied.

"Good, good. Now, Master Mark" - the way he had said Master worried me – "where you are about to go has never been seen by human eyes before, and you should feel extremely privileged."

"Why did you just call me Master?" I asked feverishly, eager to gain a foot in the conversation before he whisked me off to the mental institution, which I was sure was where he was talking about.

The question seemed to puzzle him and he stared curiously back at me. "You are my Master, our master," Merlin said with a sweep of his paw to include the other three cats.

"Wh-what do you want with me?" I stammered, extremely afraid of the answer. "And please, leave out the Master for now, it makes me feel even more uncomfortable than I already am."

This was the first time that Merlin appeared uncomfortable and he showed it by switching from one foot to the other and pulling on his whiskers with his mammoth black and white paw. With a cat-size sigh Merlin glanced at the others before proceeding.

"We need your courage, Mark."

I waited for him to elaborate, and upon seeing that he was not going to without a signal from me, I lifted myself to my elbows and looked up and the white ceiling.

"Yeah, well, I’d be glad to give it to you and if you could just leave me with a mailing address and a couple of days so that I could find it I’d be more than happy to send it right over at the first pos-"

The golden light that was seeping from Merlin’s eyes knocked me into silence. It began as a soft glow until it was brighter than the sun and I had to put my hand over my eyes to keep from being blind.

"What the-" I was breathing heavily now. My body felt like it was spinning downward, down a long deep hole. I could feel cold blackness around me and fear began to take hold.

Thump! I had landed against a soft surface. Still afraid to open my eyes I felt around with my hands, felt the warm blades of grass between my fingers and the cool breeze running across my face. The sound of gushing water was strong in the background.

I opened my eyes to the most surreal thing I have ever seen. Immediately, two huge rainbows danced across my vision, bending and twisting with the wind and the sound of the rushing water. To my stood a brilliant waterfall, at least 30 feet tall with millions of droplets of water spraying outward from the base, each one containing a mini rainbow within it pearly shell. The river that contained the waterfall stretched for as far as the eye could see across the green landscape. Eventually the line of water encountered a gigantic, golden sun, already a quarter below the horizon. It had been the morning at my house. How could? I ignored it for now, instead looking upward at the crystal clear blue sky, blemished only by the colorful rainbows that reached to the heavens.

"This, Mark, is my kingdom," Merlin said, coming to rest beside, pride burning in his eyes. "And we need you to save it."

TO BE CONTINUED…..