by VJ Erickson
***
The next day, Taylor again woke up entirely too early for her liking. Hannah must have come in late, as she was not there when Taylor had gone to bed. Taylor was usually a light sleeper, so Hannah must have been exceptionally quiet.
Taylor recalled the times when Hannah had masked their conversations with what she said was a glamour, and Taylor wondered if she had somehow used that ability to mask her sound coming in as well.
Taylor wondered how you would go about visualizing an absence of sound and couldn't quite make sense of the idea. Then again, she hadn't been able to grasp how to create an optical illusion either.
Remembering the pencils from yesterday, she pulled her cell phone out from under the corner of her bed and used its light to locate her desk. She pulled out the two pencils. She still could not tell the difference. One supposedly had a glamour on it, but she couldn't for the life of her tell which one it was.
She lay back in bed and stared at them, thinking about roses in every possible shape, size, and hue that she could imagine, but nothing changed. She must have kept at this for what felt like at least an hour, or perhaps she had fallen back asleep, but she was jolted back to attention by the light turning on in the room. She looked at the time and several hours had passed. It was now 8 AM.
"Wake up, sleepy head. Another busy day awaits!" said Hannah.
Taylor looked around for the pencils and found them on the floor beside her bed. They still looked decidedly like pencils. She grabbed them both and dropped them into her bag before setting off down the hall to the bathroom to get ready for the day.