Spinning the Infinite Thread
By Robin
I’d just like to thank everyone who read the first draft of this. Hopefully this revision will be even more enjoyable of a read.
Disclaimer: All characters from the Mummy movies are owned by Stephen Sommers and Universal Studios. All other characters are original and owned by the author.
Rated: F18
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Chapter 1
Joanna sighed as she glanced out her office window. The
“You ok?” Kim inquired with a grin. Joanna pushed some papers to the side of Kim’s desk and sat in the recently vacated space. She turned around to look at her friend with a smile.
“Of course I’m not. It’s hot, it’s Friday, and I’m leaving in 3 days. Can one really be expected to concentrate with all that going on?”
Kim laughed. “I guess not. Have you finished packing and all that?”
Joanna waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “I finished that days ago. I was so excited about being accepted, I started making a packing list the day they called me.” Jo chuckled as she glanced at Kim’s incredulous look. She raised her eyebrows and nodded as she continued. “I know, I know. She who-never-plans made a list 6 months beforehand.” She stopped to consider, then shook her head. “It amazed me too,” she stated with a smile.
“So since you’re leaving me and you are obviously too busy to do any work, what do you think about going to get some lunch?” asked Kim as she moved her hand to answer the ringing phone. Joanna picked up a pencil and started to fiddle with the automatically advancing lead while Kim talked on the phone. Her gaze strayed to the window and Kim’s voice faded out. Movie-like images flooded her mind as her strange and often frightening recent dreams raced across the back of her eyes.
The first dream had begun innocently enough; she was standing atop a pyramid, looking across the Giza plateau as she supposed it had looked some 2,000 years ago. It was devoid of any modern conveniences and there was nothing but the wind and the desert. This first dream was hardly surprising to anyone, considering the internship she had accepted; she was to work at the center for Romano-Egyptian studies in Alexandria. Subsequent nights had yielded increasingly odd nighttime visions. She had seen herself looking at all the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt lined up against a shining golden wall, their headdresses and white linen kilts outlined starkly against the glimmering walls. Sometimes she would stand in the middle of this gilded room and it would fill with a strange light. The faces of the dead kings would swirl around in a wildly babbling maelstrom. Other times the swirling would cease and a particular pharaoh would emerge out of the mist to chronicle the major events of his, or in one case her, reign. She listened as patiently as possible, but the vivid and gruesome details of each ruler’s tales were often enough to make her want to retch. She woke up every morning drenched in sweat, completely exhausted, and decidedly not ready to face the day.
Her thoughts had left her with a look of intense concentration and when Kim looked up she was concerned anew for her pretty friend. Lately, Jo’s dreams had been increasingly disturbing and vivid and the strain was beginning to show. “A new dream?” she inquired softly.
Jo jumped at the intrusion into her quiet and the pencil she was holding flew across the room. The door was opening just as the pencil went flying and it happened to hit the general manager, who arrived in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the side of the head. Jo and Kim smothered giggles, their seriousness forgotten as Tom looked up from the papers he had been reading and ruefully shook his head.
“Jo, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to kill me. You remember that incident with the automatic stapler?” Jo threw back her head and laughed as Kim doubled over in her chair with laughter, remembering the unfortunate and amusing occasion. Tom’s next words were harsh, but his tone and his face belied his open amusement. “Yeah it’s funny now, but it sure wasn’t then. I swear I had staples in my hair and socks for weeks! I honestly think you’re worse than the 10 plagues of Egypt.”
Kim laughed again, but Jo stiffened slightly at his words. Kim noticed and abruptly changed the subject. “Joanna and I were just headed out to get some food. Would you like to come?”
“No thanks, I have a conference call at one. You two get out of here. You,” he said pointing at Joanna, “I expect you to come see me before you leave.”
Jo grinned. “You can bet on it. I’m sure I can come up with some other ingenious way to sacrifice you to the office supply gods before I go.” Tom shook his head and laughed as he shut the door. The women watched him walk in front of the floor to ceiling windows that comprised the inside wall of their office, still shaking his head and smiling. The smile slowly faded from Jo’s face as she watched him go and she fiddled with the ring she wore on her right hand.
“Joanna,” Kim stated softly as she laid a hand on her friend’s arm, “you really need to go see someone about those dreams. They’re starting to interfere with your daily life.” Jo was usually so talkative it made her head spin, but these dreams kept her clammed up for days. Only when she felt she had some semblance of control over herself would she talk about it.
Jo sighed “Come on. I’ll tell you about it over lunch.” Kim was surprised that she was so ready to talk, but didn’t argue. They grabbed their purses and walked out of the little office into the athletic club. The blaring music from the spinning class made Kim laugh and she coaxed Jo to do the same. They danced through the hall as the sales reps and personal trainers that were congregating in the back laughed and waved. They burst out of the door laughing and fanning themselves in the heat and proceeded to turn the corner to walk to a nearby restaurant.
As they were looking at menus, Jo once again became silent and grave. Kim was content to sit in silence until after they had ordered their food, but when the breadbasket appeared, Jo was still locked away with her thoughts. As she reach for her dinner roll she began to haltingly tell her story.
“It started out the same as the others. I was in the great hall with the swirling and everything, but it wasn’t the Pharaohs. It something very different.” She paused and stared intently at the tablecloth, bread forgotten in her hands. After a moment she shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know how to explain it.” She looked up at Kim with troubled eyes. “I just knew it was evil. There’s no other way to describe it.” Jo methodically tore off a piece of bread and put it in her mouth. She chewed for a moment before continuing.
“When that weird, dark mist finally stopped swirling and I looked around the room, it wasn’t gold like it had been before. It was black; a shiny, almost oily black. And there were no paintings on these walls; they were covered in hieroglyphics. I tried but couldn’t make out what any of it said, but I could see what was going on to my left. There were two thrones at the far end of the room and a mummified man was sitting in the taller one. A woman was sitting next to him.” Here she paused and thought for a moment while her friend tried to absorb all the information. When Joanna was satisfied that Kim had digested everything, she continued. “I think the man and woman were Osiris and Isis, but since ancient Egypt isn’t my field, I don’t know for sure. Anyway, there was this huge set of scales in the middle of the room and there was a feather on one of the platforms of the scales, and a beating heart on the other.”
Kim grimaced at that, and Jo returned her look with a nod. “It wasn’t pretty. Anyway, the heart was apparently heavier than the feather and so Anubis, this guy wearing a big jackal head, went to tip the heart into the pit below the scales. When he got to the lip of the pit, he was frightened and started speaking in what I can only assume was ancient Egyptian. I didn’t understand a word of it. Osiris turned toward me, then closed his eyes and shook his head, like I’d done something absolutely terrible. Anubis had turned toward me by this time and when I looked at him again, he began to sort of morph into a real man. His head turned into a man’s head and his clothes changed to long robes. This man wasn’t nearly as threatening looking as Anubis, but the look in his eyes was so intense I had to turn away. I just couldn’t look at him.”
As was her habit, Joanna had been illustrating her story with vivid hand movements. As she drew to the end of her story, her petite hands stilled and lay silent in her lap. She focused her eyes on her clasped hands and continued in a whisper. “It was awful. I have never felt more contempt from any one in my life. I just wanted to get away. I started to turn, but the man grabbed me as I passed him and he looked down at me and kissed me senseless. Then I woke up.” She looked up and saw that Kim was dying to have all the details.
“Can I ask a few things?” Kim asked and when Jo nodded her assent, Kim took a bite of her recently arrived food while she formulated her questions. “Ok, let’s start at the beginning,” she said as she wiped her mouth. “Who are these Osis, Iris, and Anuby people?”
Joanna laughed through her mouthful of pasta. “It’s Osiris, Isis, and Anubis.”
Kim dismissed the comment with a wave of her hand “Whatever. What’s important is how you know who they are and what are they doing in your dreams?”
“Well, Osiris is lord of the Underworld in Egyptian mythology. His wife is Isis and their son is Anubis. Anubis has the head of a jackal and weighs the hearts of the dead to see if they are worthy to pass onto the underworld, he does other things too but I can’t remember what they are. Osiris was chopped up by his brother evil brother Seth and thrown in the Nile. Isis had to find all his parts and put him back together.” Jo leaned forward, a slightly wicked gleam in her eyes. “You know what part they thought they’d never find?” Kim shook her head and Joanna raised an eyebrow.
Kim’s eyes widened and her mouth opened incredulously. “No way!”
Joanna sat back, enjoying her friend’s shock. “Yes, way.”
“Oh my god, his brother cut it off? Where’d they find it?”
“In the bottom of the river,” Jo stated with some relish.
“That’s a sick family,” Kim declared and Joanna merely nodded. “Ok, next question,” said Kim, holding up two fingers. “Why was there a feather on the scale?”
Jo chewed and thought for a moment. “Since this isn’t really my forte, I can’t be sure, but I seem to remember that a person’s soul was weighed against the feather of somebody called Mat or Maat or something. It was to test your goodness. If you passed then you went to see Osiris and he did the final judgment.”
Kim looked horrified. “They weigh your soul against a feather? I would not want to be part of that religion.”
Joanna snorted out a laugh. “Yeah really. I think my soul would have plummeted to bottom of that pit long ago.”
“Speaking of that pit, why was what’s his name afraid of what was in it?”
Jo’s eyes glazed over as she stared off into the distance. She was deep in thought and after a few moments, Kim repeated her question. Jo bit her lip looked down with great consternation. Her next words were slow and measured. “I think,” she began, “that he wasn’t so much afraid of what was in it, but what wasn’t in it.” She looked up at the ceiling. “He seemed to be expecting to find something and it wasn’t there. And I think it was somehow my fault that it wasn’t.”
Kim looked confused. “How could it be your fault when you’d just gotten there? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Jo spread her hands and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I just knew it was. You know how, in dreams, you can know something but not know why or how you know it?” Kim nodded. “It was like that. I also just knew that I had to get away from that man.”
Kim was confused again. “But he didn’t do anything but kiss you. How is that bad?’
Joanna’s face turned bright red and she quickly glanced away. Kim’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open again. “Tell me he only kissed you.”
“Oh he did,” Joanna replied hastily “but. . .” She looked down at her lap and clasped and unclasped her fingers.
Kim leaned forward and stared at Jo. “But what?”
Joanna’s blush deepened on her fair skin and her blue eyes glowed. “But it was nice,” she stated simply. Kim was startled by this, not because of the content, but how it was expressed. As long as she had known Joanna, she had been very open and frank about her admiration for men. She was not a whore, but she certainly liked her men.
“What’s got you so embarrassed?” Kim asked as she made a disbelieving face. “I know for a fact you’ve had your share of kisses, so this should be nothing new, even if it was in a dream.”
Joanna blinked hard and looked like she was going to speak several times. Her mouth opened and then shut as she searched for the right words. “I’ve been kissed many times,” she began slowly, “but never like that. It was like the earth opened up and swallowed me whole. Not in a completely bad way mind you; it was just a total loss of control. I couldn’t tell where I started and the floor ended. It seemed that the whole universe had suddenly turned into a giant, completed picture rather than billions of puzzle pieces floating around.”
Joanna looked like she was ready to cry. Her eyes were bright and tears sparkled on the tips of her reddish-brown eyelashes. Kim understood completely. She herself had felt like that the first time she had kissed the man who was to later become her husband. She also understood that Joanna had never felt that with a man and that’s what was so distressing to her. Kim reached across the table and gathered Joanna’s small hands into her own, squeezing them lightly as she did so. Joanna looked up into Kim’s compassion filled face and was a little comforted. Kim and Joanna’s younger sister Christiana were the cornerstones of Joanna’s mental stability, as she was for them, so she didn’t feel bad about plunging into long explanation.
“It’s upsetting me because I don’t feel that way about Justin,” she said, referring to her boyfriend of three years. “I love him, but I know I’m not in love with him. There’s a big difference.” Jo was almost defensive about the topic, when there was very little call to be. Kim knew exactly where she was coming from. “I’ve been a good girlfriend to him for years, and he’s been good to me, but I think the time has come for me to end it.” She blew out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding and looked up at Kim. “I just can’t be with him, wondering if there’s someone out there that will make me feel like that man in the dream.”
“Joanna, I’m proud of you.” Jo cocked her head and looked surprised. Kim laughed at this and nodded her head. “I’m serious. You’re doing what so many of us don’t have the guts to do. You’ve followed your heart to Egypt, and that will be a wonderful thing. If your heart says that you aren’t supposed to be with Justin, then you’re not.” She took a long, assessing look at her friend. “Honestly, I’m surprised you stayed with him as long as you did.”
“Why?”
Kim shrugged nonchalantly. “He’s just not for you. He’s nice and sweet and makes good money, but is that really what you want?” When Jo opened her mouth to speak, Kim shushed her. “No, don’t answer that: I can tell you exactly what you want. You wouldn’t care if you and your man had to live in a shack on the side of the road. As long as he loved you but didn’t smother you, and was brave and stoic and kind and gentle all at the same time, you’d live anywhere. You’d find someway to make it work, no matter what.”
Joanna’s mouth began to turn up in a shy smile. “You’re probably right.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s not going to be easy though,” she said, referring to her imminent single hood.
Kim tossed her napkin down onto the table and stood as she shook her head. “No, it’s not. But in the end it’ll be better for you and for him. You don’t want to string him along while you’re thousands of miles away, do you?”
“No, that’s not fair,” Jo said as she stood and attempted to pull out cash to pay her portion of the bill. Kim laid a hand over her hand and the bills.
“Let me take care of it. Think of it as my parting gift.” Joanna smiled softly and hugged her dear friend.
“Thank you.” She sucked in a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Now, let’s go back so I can get my stuff and go home.”
Later that evening Joanna wasn’t so sure she was ready to go traipsing off to Egypt. Not when her favorite book and her teddy bear were missing. She growled in frustration as she attempted to locate the lost items in the many boxes piled around the apartment. She dug through one of the bigger boxes and still came up empty handed. She sat back on her heels and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. She had on a bathrobe and her wet hair continued to be aggravating. As she was trying to think of some place she might not have searched, she glanced up at the clock in her bathroom.
“Oh God, it’s five minutes ‘till!” She sprinted to her bedroom and began frantically searching for the clothes she had planned to don before Justin arrived. As she looked around her bedroom, she realized that she didn’t really need clothes; she was comfortable in her old bathrobe and she wanted to be a centered as possible for what was to come. She contemplated this for a moment and then turned on her the ball of her foot and exited the bare room. She padded into the kitchen and looked around for something to do. She found no food to ease her boredom, nor did pacing ease her agitation. With continually rising frustration she wandered aimlessly from room to room hoping to find her missing items or at least something to do. She had just begun to dig through another box when there was a knock at the door.
Joanna slowly rose and hesitantly approached the door. She turned the lock and when she opened the door, Justin was standing there, his normal handsome self, holding a bouquet of peonies and the long lost bear. He grinned at her dishabille and extended the stuffed animal and the flowers to her. She took them gratefully and turned away, but not before he had seen the look on her face. His grin fell and his hazel eyes bored into her blue-gray ones. She had to look up to meet his eyes and he was suddenly felt like his chest had been crushed by what he saw there.
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to say what I think you’re going to say,” he asked in a broken whisper.
Joanna leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “Justin, I have to,” she said sadly. She pushed away from the wall and came to stand in front of him. She took his hands in hers and hesitantly began. “From the first day we met, I thought you were wonderful. You were everything I could have asked for.” She paused and looked away. “But that was three years ago. You’re a different person than you were then and so am I.” Justin breathed deeply and tried to pull his hands away. Joanna held on tight and her eyes pleaded with him to understand. “No, you have to hear me out and you know it.”
Reluctantly Justin turned his head back to face the love of his life. She was so beautiful it made him ache not to kiss her; he had loved her from the first moment she literally fell into his lap. They had been at a music festival held that Atlanta held every year. He was there to see his favorite band and had decided that there was no better place to see them than directly in front of the stage. The crowd had been rowdier than usual and as he was moving in unison with the rest of the jumping bodies, someone had knocked him over. As he stumbled and fell, a group of young women began to fall as well. The woman closest to him never regained her balance and had fallen straight into his lap and his life. She had looked up at him with the most apologetic look a human could muster….and then she smiled. Justin had felt like the sun had stopped shining on the rest of the world and only shone on him and this woman. He had known from that moment his life would never be that same.
Justin pulled himself out of his reverie when he felt Joanna tugging on his hands. He looked down at her and realized there was nothing to be done to change her mind. He’d seen that stubborn look thousands of times before and there was no man on earth that could tell her no when she had her mind set on something. Certainly he had never been able to say no. “Jo, make this short please,” he pleaded. “I don’t think my heart can handle much more.” Justin closed his eyes and waited.
Joanna knew that she was putting him through hell and hated herself for it. Why was she being so selfish? It was obvious that he was in love with her, and of course she loved him and found him attractive, but something just wasn’t right. This was not the man for her and she knew it. She warred with herself though for several moments. Suddenly the dreams of the last month came flooding back to her and she realized she’d never told Justin about any of them. If she couldn’t tell her boyfriend, who could she tell? That settled the matter and Joanna plunged ahead.
“Justin, I love you very much, but not in the way you love me. I value you as a wonderful friend and I think you’re amazing. You’re just not the right man for me.” She took her hands away from his and ran them through the ends of her hair in a nervous gesture. “I don’t know if there’s anything I can say to make it better. I know it hurts. It hurts me too.”
Justin finally looked at his now ex-girlfriend. He saw the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes and almost gave into the urge to fling himself at her and bawl like a baby. He knew she hurt; she was kind and compassionate and easily moved. He knew this hadn’t been easy for her and, as much as he hurt, he didn’t want her to know the depth of it. “Well,” he said with a trace of humor, “at least you didn’t go off to Egypt and come back and say ‘Justin, I’ve met and married this fabulous man. I think it’s time you and I broke up.’”
Joanna’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. She sputtered and Justin smiled. It was very rare that she was speechless and to be the cause of her lack of speech was cause for much smirking. He smiled wider as Joanna fell utterly silent and She stared at him as if she half expected him to grow a third eye.
“Look, baby doll,” he said as he leaned forward caress her cheek, “It’s not like this has never happened to me before. I love you desperately but I knew from the first time I laid eyes on you that I’d have trouble keeping you. I’m not sure any man will ever be able to keep you, but you were mine for a long time and I thank you for that.” He leaned forward to kiss her forehead and couldn’t resist pulling her into his arms one last time. He hugged her close and she fiercely returned the embrace. “If you ever come back here and decide you want me back, I can almost promise that I’ll come running. There never has been and never will be anyone else like you Joanna Rae.”
Jo pulled away from him and looked skeptical. She stood with her hands on her hips and a wary look on her face. “Ok this is weird,” she stated as she backed away. “You’re not mad or anything?”
“I am not about to tell you that you’ve broken my heart, even though you have, and I am also not about to cry, which I want to do.” Justin ran a hand over his short hair, causing it to stand up straight. “I could rant and rave I suppose, but I want our last memories of each other to be good.” The last few words trailed off as he leaned over and began rummaging through the open suitcase on the floor. He continued to talk as he searched for something. “So here’s the plan: You get dressed. We’ll load all your stuff into the truck and take it all to the shipping place. After we’ve done that, I’ll take you to your parent’s place like we planned.” Justin straightened and handed Joanna several articles of clothing. A pair of low slung blue jeans and a light gray men’s tank undershirt dangled from one hand and a pair of lacy white underwear and a sheer white bra dangled from the other.
Justin looked at her sheepishly “These were always my favorites.” Joanna accepted the clothes and went into her bedroom to change. She looked stupidly at the clothing in her hand, not quite believing the exchange that had just taken place. She dressed in a stupor and added a pair of gold flip flops to the ensemble.
When she walked out of the room, Justin smiled at her. He had already begun to move her boxes down to his truck and he looked to be on the 3rd or 4th load. Joanna grabbed a box and they worked in silence for some time. When the last of the boxes were secured, Joanna ran back upstairs for her suitcases. She realized that she still had not found her book and she became almost hysterical. “Oh God, I can’t go without it, I just can’t!” she wailed.
“Hey, it’s ok,” Justin soothed as he grabbed her shoulders. “You’re sure it wasn’t in any of the boxes?
Joanna nodded and Justin grinned. “Well, we’ll just have to search every nook and cranny until we find it won’t we?” Joanna was once again left speechless by this gallant behavior. If she had been in the same position she would have told him to go to hell; an opinion that she didn’t realize she had voiced aloud until Justin laughed. “Sweetheart, there are lots of things you’d do differently than I. We’re very different, so let’s quit discussing this and find the damn book, ok?”
Jo opened her mouth as though to say something but decided against it. They searched for about a quarter of an hour until Justin came through the door of the kitchen into the living room. He was brandishing a book in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. He tossed the well-worn copy across the room and into Joanna’s waiting hands. The book was freezing and she looked up at him with questions in her eyes. “In the freezer” he stated simply. “Now that you’ve got everything, can we please go?” Joanna’s eyes filled with laughter as she clutched the book to her chest.
Jo curled up in her favorite chair in her parent’s house and sighed. She was full to the brim with her favorite foods, all of which had been provided by her mother, and the dinner had been incredibly pleasant. Her mother and sister had chosen to read books while her father and the family Great Dane, Zeus, had decided to sit on the couch and watch television. Joanna sighed and closed her eyes, soaking up the quiet hum of the room, and it wasn’t long before she was sound asleep.
The swirling descent into the golden room was the same as always, but there was someone waiting for her this time. His back was turned to her and she thought she glimpsed dark hair underneath the jackal headdress he wore, but she couldn’t be sure. The rest of his costume consisted only of a linen wrap around his middle and a few tattoos. She was momentarily distracted by his gleaming and well honed body but soon realized her attention should be centered on what was actually happening. The strange man was wrestling a creature of some kind and trying to keep her from seeing whatever it was. He was yelling something to her in Arabic, but his dialect was so different from the one she spoke he had to repeat himself several times before she caught it. “Run, get out of here quickly!” he shouted at her.
Some rational part of Joanna’s brain wanted to take his advice, but she had never been one to take orders very well, so she took a step towards him. She knew she could help him if she could just get to the creature he was holding, but with every step she took the monster seemed to grow larger. She could begin to make out an outline; it was like nothing she had ever even conjured in her wildest imagination. The thing had what looked to be the head of a crocodile and the legs of a hippopotamus. She couldn’t make out the torso for the man’s broad and sculpted back was blocking her view.
The man shouted again but this time in heavily accented English “Come no closer, silly woman!” he yelled harshly.
Joanna took no offense at his words or his tone. She knew that she had to get closer to be of any help, but the closer she got the larger and stronger the monster became.
“Please. Come no closer,” begged the man within the mask. His voice sounded weary and heartbreakingly sad. She stepped forward to try to give him some kind of comfort and in doing so heard him howl in pain. She looked over and gasped as she saw what had transpired. The monster’s huge claws had cut a deep gash in his right bicep. Joanna back peddled a few steps and the man and the monster seemed to shrink. It seemed that the farther she got away from the demon creature, the smaller it became. It also seemed however that the farther she was from the man, the smaller and less powerful he became. No matter what she did, the chances of being able to defeat the creature seemed more and more remote.
“What can I do?” she asked the man, anguished. “If I come any closer, you both get bigger, but the farther I go you both seem to lose power. You can’t hold out forever, and if I go away then that awful thing will eventually die, but so will you.” Tears began to roll down her soft cheeks. She was so frustrated and so tired and there seemed to be nothing she could do.
Joanna lowered herself to the floor to watch and wait. The man and the creature continued to struggle and the demon managed to inflict several more wounds on its victim before the room began to spin and swirl again. Joanna leapt up and looked at the ceiling. The once starry blue sky had turned an ominous black and the room began to fill with a strange mist. Joanna felt the familiar pull back to her real self and for the first time resisted the urge. The man turned his head just enough for her to see the profile of the mask. “Go now. I will be here when you return.”
His softly spoken words reached her foggy brain and as soon as she understood what he was saying she awakened to find herself back on the couch in her parent’s house. She looked around the quite room in bewilderment and touched her hand to her face. She felt the residue of dried tears and pulled her hand quickly away.
Joanna glanced at the huge clock on the opposite wall and sighed with relief. It was nearly midnight and she could go to bed without raising suspicion. She slowly unfolded her legs and levered herself up from the soft chair. She walked to her parent’s couch, giving them each a kiss and a mumbled goodnight. She repeated the same process for Christiana, and trudged up to her bedroom, hoping against hope to have a dreamless night.
Two days later, Joanna stood with her family at the airport and made her goodbyes. With the last few days having wholly uneventful, Jo felt rested and ready to take on the world. She was sad to leave her family, but she knew that they would be in touch and that she would see them again before she knew it. With final hugs and kisses to mother, father, and sister, Joanna smiled and walked away from them and into her new life.
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Spinning The Infinite Thread – Chapter 2 (coming soon)