Repeating dreams. What silly things, you think.
…But then you have one. Them. Feel them writhing in the crannies of your brain, etched into the sockets of your eyeballs like fate.
I never much liked the concept of fate, but it would be pretty damn easy, wouldn’t it? Slipping into a dress the seamstresses of the universe sewed for you, and only you, not having to think about what to wear in the morning, or that infuriating ‘I know that shirt is clean I need that shirt where the hell is that shirt I hate that shirt I hate this mess I hate this all of this.’
Pause. Breathe. Rewind. Repeat.
What a slick little mantra. The little black dress in the wardrobe of the world.
When Mother Nature gets dressed in the morning, what does she wear, I wonder? The elements, spun in fine snowflake silks, draped in sheer cotton sunshine? Does she get dressed at all, lounging in her bare glory instead, the curves of her body supple in the clouds?
I had a dream about a woman who wore no clothes. A nightmare. Many nightmares. Plural, like a skip in a CD, infuriating and terrifying every time your favorite song plays because you’re not expecting it to be ripped about at the seams as all the precious notes tumble out like gems.
Tumbling down,
down…
down…
Some people have dreams like that – falling dreams. They grip the edges of the mattress just to hold onto anything, just to feel the comfort of a familiar fabric as they whisk through the open door closet called the sky. Up there, there are no hangers – just liquid sleeves and billowing blouses. Unbuttoned. Loose –
Loose lips sink ships. Quiet now, quiet. Time for bed. Shh. Shhh…
There was a lake – is a lake – carved into the reel of tape playing in my head. A midnight matinee, expect I’m the only person who got the memo, and I stand alone up to my waist in freezing cold, black water. When I slip my palms underneath the surface, I feel like I’m slicing glass with my fingers, chipping into the devils diamond. Feeling it up, discovering it, replaying it like an old song. Sexy. Tangos in the dark, sand between my frozen toes, everywhere else hot, hot - hotter. I’ve got that tingle radiating out from the center of my body as my limbs start to tremble and the only way I know that my hands are still attached to me, that they haven’t been slit off and boxed like dead fish all cold and icy, is the sight of the ripples they’re making from shaking underwater.
I’m convulsing. This lake is far too cold.
“Come inside, everyone,” a voice says behind me, beneath the porch light. My grandmother, maybe.
Ben and Haley and Dad are standing in the water too. We’re all scattered and shattered and still, waiting for something. Someone. Still watching for it. Her.
The lady in the water. She’s back again, she always comes back.
Pause. Breathe. Rewind. Repeat.
What was that? – a disturbance in the window pane calm of the water’s surface.
It’s easy to mistake a banging heart for something erotic, something lower and deep down and up and right there –
Am I creating the ripples?
Quiet now, quiet. Don’t make a move. Don’t make a sound. Shh…
Haley sneezes and her snot goes everywhere. Achoo. Ah-ch-you. Chyou. You.
Oh, please, anyone but you. Anyone but her.
Shit.
Get Haley out of the water, now. Someone get her out of this cesspool, before –
Zip. She’s gone. Her tiny nine year old body disappears under the liquid shadows we all stand in, mortified, not swimming.
My grandma is screaming in the background and her voice tears like a scratched record player and I can feel my ears bleed, bleeding blood, bleeding bloody, itchy jewels…
There’s crimson around my waistline. The water is tainted.
Zip –
My father disappears in the same spot my sister did. He had been looking for her, trying to pull a ghost out of purgatory. I love you, dad. Goodbye. Again.
There’s terror in his eyes as his pale skin slips under the surface - raw, primal fear as hot and molten as sex sizzled and doused in the lake. Snuffed. Enough! –
Zip –
My brother sloshes under as easy as a rag doll being flung over the shoulder of an overactive toddler, only this child is fucked up. It wants to gauge out the eyes of every doll and strip off any scrap of clothing and discard them all naked on the shoreline, food for the snakes and eels in the morning. Eyeless, exposed, dolls. Mouths wide open in a final scream. Red ears and frostbite toes.
I wish it were only a child.
She looks like Ana to me as she rises out of the water, naked. No dress, just skin and bones. Skin the color of bones, gleaming off of the impenetrable vortex I’m frozen in like a cornered animal.
In the water I see her hollow eyes, black on black, demonic beetle pupils swimming in motor oil, wriggling in grease. In the water, I see her gaze shift upwards – upwards – towards me in a slow, reaching drift – again…
P-pause. Breathe. Brrr-eathe. Brrrrewind. Rep-reap-
It’s me and her alone, the lady in the lake. She’s translucent, a ghost, but so palpable all the same; if I touched her skin it would be slick, an internal organ smothered in jelly. Her albino white hair is stringy and dank as seaweed, snakes, Medusa – strangling me.
But it’s those inhumanly long fingernails. Those fucking fingernails that scrape across the surface of the water as if they’re digging into a chalkboard, making screaming noises as if the lake is begging, pleading – I hate this mess I hate all of this don’t touch me don’t touch meee –
Screeech –
I have a phobia of two things:
Chalk,
And drowning.
I feel like she’s going to claw me to shreds and pull me under like a great white shark and suck me inside of her ribs that look so much like gills, ingest me like a cold, dead, fish.
Rubies in the water at midnight, and she’s salivating for a taste. She. It. This thing –
Is coming towards me –
This ree(a)l of tape keeps playing inside my head.
It’s day like this I learn to hate the present tense.
Repeating dreams. What silly things, I thought.
…But then I had one.
And, it had me.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Does this happen to anyone else besides me?
Also:
Be a cool kid and support To Write Love on Her Arms.
(It doesn't hurt that their clothes are really cute)
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