Melissa's Dream

MELISSA’S DREAM

By Milton Cust

Whisper, whisper, whisper, rustle, rustle, rustle.

13-year-old Melissa Harding was woken from her sound sleep by noises in her bedroom. At first, she just lay in her bed and tried to peer through the darkness of her room but when she saw no one and heard nothing she thought she was just imagining things and rolled over to go back to sleep.

She was just drifting off when she heard something that made her come instantly awake. Her eyes flew open, and she propped herself up in bed.

Whisper, whisper, whisper, rustle, rustle, rustle. There it was again and this time she knew she wasn’t imagining things. There was definitely somebody or something in her bedroom. 

Still unable to see anything in the darkness she reached over and turned on her bedside lamp expecting to see her dad or mom, or maybe her pesky little brother trying to play some trick on her. If it was him, he was certainly going to get it because she had told him hundreds of times to stay out of her room, but sometimes he would enter it anyway just to bug her. But nobody was there, not her parents, not her little brother, nobody. 

The lamp illuminated every corner of her bedroom, so it was impossible for anybody to be hiding. So where did the noise come from? Her bathroom? Melissa considered the idea and then got out of bed and crept into it but found nothing. 

Then she had another idea and went to her window which was opened wide to keep her room cool. She cautiously peered through it, thinking maybe it was somebody outside that made the noises but again she saw nobody, and the night was silent except for the sound of trees that swayed gently in the evening breeze. 

Melissa stood listening for a moment, studying the slight movements of the tree branches. It seemed to her that occasionally they did seem to rub against the eave that ran around top of the house.

That’s it, she mumbled to herself, tree branches. Mystery solved!

Feeling a little ashamed over being frightened by such a stupid thing, Melissa turned to go back to bed when she heard the noise again. 

Whisper, whisper, whisper, rustle, rustle, rustle.

The sound made her jump back in surprise. It wasn’t the trees at all. The noise seemed to be coming from her closet. 

Was her brother in there, trying to scare her? 

She was furious as she threw open the door to the closet, prepared to deal with the little pest by grabbing a hold of him, and bodily throwing him out of her room. Melissa even pushed aside the clothes hanging from a hanger to make sure her brother wasn’t hiding in the back of it, but she didn’t find him. She didn’t find anyone. 

“Now what?” Melissa asked as she closed the closet door. Ghosts, boogeymen! She felt a tinge of fear race through her but laughed at the idea. She was 13, a teenager and too old to believe in such things. Still, Melissa was forced to consider the possibility as she looked around her room. If there was nobody in it or the closet, then where was the noise coming from?

She remembered when she was younger and used to wake up in the middle of the night, thinking there were ghosts in her room. She recalled how it used to scare her so badly she would run crying into her parent’s room where her dad would hold her to console her and then take her by the hand, lead her back into her room and together they would search every nook and cranny until she was satisfied there were no boogeymen. 

As Melissa recalled those memories, she realized the only place she hadn’t looked was under the bed. When her dad did it with her, they always looked under the bed together. She quickly bent down to look hoping to use the same logic her dad used to calm her growing fears. She found nothing under the bed but a few pieces of lint. She was about to tell herself all her fears were crazy, there was absolutely nobody in her room.

Then Melissa heard the noise again.

 Whisper, whisper, whisper, rustle, rustle, rustle. And IT was coming from the closet, this time she was sure of it now, so she took a few steps toward it and pulled the door open again, but this time slowly and more cautiously. 

Knowing there was nothing big hiding in it, she picked up a shoe, kept her eyes glued to the floor and began to methodically search through old shoes and boxes. She carefully kicked and prodded each one with her foot, expecting a mouse to run out when its hiding place was discovered. 

As Melissa moved deeper into the far corner of the closet, she expected to see the mouse at any moment so she held the shoe at the ready so she could give it a good whack. Even though she was usually so scared of mice she screamed and ran at the first sight of them, this time she was fully prepared to do battle with it. That little varmint had woken her up and made so angry that she was bound and determined to stand her ground and give it a good smack right on its stupid head. 

It was behind a box, in the farthest corner of the closet that Melissa discovered source of the noises, and it wasn’t a mouse. It was farthest thing possible from a mouse. It was a tiny, human man crouched behind one of her old beat-up sneakers, and it was hard to tell who gave the biggest scream. Him or her. 

Melissa gave a startled wild yell and screamed, “there you are.” She was fully prepared to swing her shoe at the miniature man because after all she had been through, she was in no mood to back down from anybody or anything.

At the same time the three-inch-tall male was yelling at her, “please don’t hit me, I come in peace.” 

“Peace, what do you mean peace,” Melissa demanded as she starred in disbelief at the diminutive, little human who stood looking up at her. 

“We will not hurt you so please, put down the shoe,” the man pleaded. 

It suddenly seemed very funny to Melissa. He’s three inches tall and only weighs a few pounds, while I’m five foot tall and weigh 90 pounds, and he promises not to hurt ME. I must look like the giant of all giants to him. 

“Hurt me,” Melissa snorted in derision. “I don’t know who or what you are but if you don’t come out into the light where I can see you then I’m going to hurt YOU.” She waved the shoe menacingly as she peered down at the strange little man through the dim light in the closet.“

All right, okay, we’re coming out,” the man replied. 

He began to walk towards Melissa who kept a wary eye on him as she stepped backwards into her room. Her eyes popped wide open in utter surprise when she saw the head of a second little man suddenly pop up from inside an old shoe. The second noise maker seemed to take forever as he laboriously climbed out of her shoe and joined his companion in the march out of the closet. 

It only took Melissa two steps to be back in the bedroom, but the two small men took about a dozen before they were out of closet and Melissa was able to get her first good look at them. 

They looked like real human guys, alright, only in a radically condensed version, and the more Melissa studied them the more they seemed to look familiar. It was only when she knelt right down on the floor to get a better look at them that it suddenly dawned on her what she was looking at. 

Miniature Star Trek characters, complete with Star Fleet uniforms? Her eyes grew big and round when she recognized the Vulcan, Tuvock, and the handsome star ship pilot, Tom Paris as the two little people standing before her.

“This can’t be real, I must be still sleeping, and dreaming all this,” Melissa asked the pair who up until now had remained silent. Then to prove her point she pinched herself on the arm but yelled “OUCH” at the sudden pain. 

“No, you are not dreaming, this is very real and yes, we are from the Star Ship Voyager. You see we do exist out there in the far reaches of space, Tuvock explained in the same logical voice that Melissa had heard countless times on TV. 

“I am Tuvock, and this is Tom Paris,” he added. 

 Melissa replied,” I know, I know who you are but aren’t you supposed to be just on TV. I know I’m only 13 but I’m not that stupid. You guys are played by actors from Hollywood or somewhere and somebody writes up all those things you do. Everybody knows that.”

“If everybody knows that, then why are we here in your room and not on your TV?” The ever-logical Tuvock asked as he stared up at Melissa. He then answered his own question by saying “therefore if we are here, it is perfectly logical that we are real.” 

“Oh yeah, then what about your size? The real Star Trek characters are like, life size and you two are so small your spaceship must be the size of a match box,” Melissa asked with a triumphant look on her face. Feeling she had finally bested these guys. 

“We are life size but unfortunately we had a mal-function in our transporter system when we beamed down here and it shrunk us to this size,” Paris calmly explained. 

“And why are you’re here, hiding in my closet in the middle of the night?” Melissa demanded.

“Because we followed the Borg here,” Paris replied. 

“Borg in my room,” Melissa asked in a skeptical voice.

“Yes, the Borg and they do intend to assimilate you and everybody else on Earth as well, so we need your help,” Tuvock replied.

Melissa eyes narrowed as she scanned her room. Even though she had just finished thoroughly searching it, she automatically took a quick second look. When she found nothing unusual, she turned her attention back to the closet, suddenly recalling she had discovered Tuvock and Paris before searching the final two boxes in her closet.

With a frown and a look of concern on her face, she picked up her sneaker again and reached back inside her closet to find the boxes. There they were, side by side in the farthest corner of the closet. Was the Borg in one of them? 

Yes, they had to be because it was the only place she hadn’t searched yet, Melissa reasoned. Now what to do? At first Melissa was prepared to kick the boxes to see if the Borg would pop out like Tuvock and Paris, but after a moment she reconsidered the idea.

If the Borg were really in them, they would jump out and scatter and she would have a big job trying to track them all down before they scattered all over the house and started assimilating everybody. So instead of kicking at the boxes she reached in and grabbed both of them, then backed out of the closet holding one in each hand. They had lids on them so she couldn’t see what was inside of them, but as Melissa placed each one to her ear, she felt she could definitely hear noise“ 

The Borg must in here,” Melissa told Tuvock and Paris. Her eyes were wide with fear as she carefully set the boxes down on the floor. The pair of Star Trek characters immediately stepped up to the boxes, but they were so short their heads barely reached the top of them.

“Now what do I do,” Melissa asked?

“If the Borg are in there you must destroy them immediately which might be difficult as everyone knows the Borg are very hard to kill. They are very resilient,” Tuvock warned.

Melissa nodded in agreement, and cautiously took the lids of both boxes. Sure enough, tiny, miniature Borg in their strange costumes were marching around in circles with their mechanical beady eyes staring up at her.

“You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” She could plainly hear the familiar, evil chant when she peered into the box.

“So, you think resistance is futile, well we’ll see about that?” Melissa spoke back to the dwarf-like creatures as she carefully put the lids back on the boxes because she didn’t want any Borg to escape, but it was also because she couldn’t stand the sight of them. They looked so ugly to her. They gave her the creeps. 

Once she was sure the lids were on secure enough that they couldn’t be dislodged, she stepped back to consider what she would have to do to destroy the Borg. They are so small she could get a big book and start swatting them down like flies, but Melissa shuddered in disgust at the thought of getting that close to the Borg. Besides, it would be way too messy, and she’d just have to flush them down the toilet when they were all dead. At the thought of the word toilet, Melissa ceased her contemplation, stood up and went into her bathroom. 

Yes, the toilet is probably the best place for them, she told herself. I’ll flush them all down the drain so to speak, she muttered as she flipped up the toilet lid. 

However, just to make sure they’re properly assimilated into their new home, I’ll add a few things. Melissa reached down and opened up the doors to a small cabinet where her mother kept cleaning products. After pulling several containers, she studied the labels on a couple marked with a big X, with the word poisonous written underneath them.

Which one to use, well why not both? Melissa poured something called Draino into the toilet bowl as well as something from another bottle that had a great big acid sign on it. She watched it begin to sizzle and bubble in the bowl like a witches’ brew. Satisfied, she returned to her bedroom and retrieved the boxes.

“Where were you, I could hear the Borg trying to get out. Don’t you understand how dangerous they are? They must be destroyed,” Tuvock demanded with irritation. 

“I know and I have found a perfect solution,” Melissa assured him.

With a box under each arm she returned to the bathroom and was happy to see that her concoction was still happily bubbling away in the toilet bowl.

Taking a lid off the first box, Melissa again heard the irritating “you will be assimilated chant. “Really, try assimilating this,” Melissa snickered as she tipped the box over, so all the Borg tumbled into the seething cauldron. She quickly repeated the process with the second Borg-filled box and watched as they also hit the bubbling water in the toilet bowl with a loud splash. 

She smiled when she saw that within in seconds of landing in the toilet bowl, most of them were consumed by her seething concoction. A few managed to stay on top of the water for a bit, but they too soon became smoking, smoldering ruins as the caustic substances ate away at them. In a few minutes they had all disappeared beneath the surface, but Melissa waited several more until she was satisfied that all the Borg were gone. 

Then she flushed the toilet and said with an air of finality. “There, I guess resistance wasn’t all that futile.”

Melissa hurried back to her bedroom and assured Tuvoc and Paris she’d put the Borg out of their misery. 

“You have done very well,” Tuvoc praised her. However, we still have a problem. We are a long ways from the space shuttle which will take us back to the Voyager. Will you help us?”

“Of course, but it’ll have to be tomorrow morning,” Melissa assured them. “Now hurry up and get back in my closet because I think my parents just woke up. If they see you, they will never understand.”

Melissa crawled back into her bed just as her mother knocked softly on her door. 

“What are you doing up in the middle of the night?” The woman asked as she entered the  bedroom and stared down at her daughter. 

“Nothing, mother. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up and went to the bathroom and then got a drink of water,” Melissa replied as she pulled the covers up.

Melissa had just closed her eyes when she heard the familiar, rustle, rustle, rustle, whisper, whisper, whisper.

“Can’t you guys shut up and let me get me sleep,” she whispered to them.