Excerpt: Strangers

When Jessica opened her eyes, she knew that she had a concussion. Why else would she be seeing jungle where there should be mountains and cedar trees and bright blue skies? The last thing that she remembered was being thrown from her horse when he had shied at a rattler between two boulders on the trail. There had been a blinding light – that must have been the moment when her head hit the ground- and now she was hallucinating, seeing jungle where no jungle could possibly exist. She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to focus her mind on each part of her body, made an effort to focus on the pain instead of fighting it, so that she could assess the damage, the way that her father had taught her to. But, oddly, there didn’t seem to be any pain. Her befuddled mind couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find it.
She definitely should have been in pain. You didn’t get bucked off of a horse in the middle of a rocky mountain trail and not feel anything afterwards. She tried to wiggle her first her fingers and then her toes, to make sure that none of her extremities were severely damaged, but she couldn’t make them move, couldn’t tell if her efforts were yielding any results at all. She couldn’t even say for certain whether she still HAD fingers and toes. Her heart thudded heavily in her chest. Maybe she had broken her neck. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t any pain, because her spinal chord had been disconnected and her brain was no longer plugged into the rest of her body. A sick certainty filled her at the thought. In a panic she tried to sit up so that she could see her body, so that she could be certain that the rest of her still existed... but she didn’t move an inch. Her eyes rolled from side to side in panic, but she soon closed them again, to shut out the disturbing sight of the imaginary jungle all around her.