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Is there something wrong, my dear?
No, nothing wrong. I simply am buried in too deep right now.
A glimmering red candy-moon hung low in the sky, strung from the heavens by an invisible string of fairy floss. A girl sits in the crescent curve of the caramel, brushing her hair with a serrated butcher knife and singing softly to herself. Candy canes arc into the swollen midnight sky, which is a rich velvet purple and deep as the lake of poisoned chocolate below. Standing by the waters of sweetness, a small person in an orange dress burns sugar-flowers one by one whilst singing the same song the girl sings up above.
The butcher knife carves slowly into the glass-like cracking moon, switching targets from the girl’s coal-black strands of silky hair, and the single remaining flower below goes up in orange-scarlet flames and dissipates into dust.
Liselle Ockschenople awakens from yet another sharp-edged, candy-coated dream and shakes herself from the depths of sleep, death’s greatest imitator, in the dusky dawn of Bremen. Wispy grey clouds twist and snake their tendrils into the stuffy, greyer sky that was an almost unreal-seeming canopy over the shadeless city. A sharp whistle slices through the clogged air from a black steam engine on the tracks nearby. Rubbing the space between her dark, heavy eyebrows, a dull pressure settling between them that Liselle knew was just another one of her impulses, Liselle tried in vain to recall what had awakened her - what was in that dream that she knew she had but knew she did not remember?
The smell of burning breakfast wafted from outside her room in the musty brick flat, and Liselle remembered sharply the eggs she had been attempting to salvage before she had collapsed in her bed with an awful, searing migraine. The headaches had been coming more and more often recently, and she might have gone to a doctor had she not had little to no change to spare. The most of it was already going to her bare, basic necessities, and she thought quite often that the only reason she still had the flat was because of her dear auntie’s generosity before her passing away at the age of fifty-three. She had left her fifty thousand American dollars - not that that was much help to her. With the help of a shabby, distrustworthy bank, she had converted it to the local currency, and most of that had gone in the last two years, even with her best attempts at budgeting.
Cursing, Liselle slid on her slippers - which were falling apart and now showed quite some pale toe - and rushed through the small apartment to the dirty kitchen-and-dining-area that she lived in and had lived in for quite some time by now - almost thirty-eight months. She sighed and cleaned up the charcoal bricks that might once have been fried eggs, contemplating yet another dreary day in her absolutely dreary world.
A girl and another one sit together nestled in the crescent this time, the girl’s arms crossed gently around the shoulders and torso of the other. She breathes gently into their sweet-smelling curly hair, which is a rich golden-orange. She leans against the inner curve of the moon and smiles. The other one leans back into her in turn, and they sleep peacefully in the candy moon together.
The oddities began not with the headaches, which had been plaguing her for quite some time now, but with a premonition much like that of a shift in a dream - a placid, bland brick house becomes a cabin in the snowy mountains, the party-clown with the red nose has blue streaks across its eyelids instead of the former red, or your school becomes, quite suddenly, the interior of your house, but remaining to be your uninspired red brick junior high that housed your dreaded English teacher - who was now a pale, selfish vampire who smelled strangely and quizzically of garlic bread. These small and subtle differences in the reality of the silver-laced land of dreams were brushed off quite easily by its inhabitants, regarded as if it had always been that way - though you know it wasn’t, and once you’ve shaken yourself from that smothering blanket of falseness and hopefulness, you look back - if you are to remember - and realize with an unsettling manner that that was not the way it was supposed to be.
Liselle, quite like these dream-inhabitants, pushed away the dissimilarities with disquieting ease (considering the fact that she had once gone absolutely catatonic upon moving with her family to downtown Bremen) to the very back of her subconscious and continued to live as though that frying dish was always green in place of the former vermillion, and she was fluent in French instead of British English - waking up suddenly unable to recall the words for Guten Morgen and having bonjour dissipate from the abyss of nonknowing and vanish suddenly into her own head. But that was normal - she had always known French, after all, and English remained a mystery, such as the former red of the dish which had, like where English had gone and French had always been, disappeared into the void of insufferable, impenetrable unknowingness.
Liselle awakened on that anticlimactic Saturday noon splayed on her dirty wood floor, which had slowly been accumulating dust over the years, clutching her dull romance paperback in her left hand, which is numb with that aggravating sense of pins-and-needles that always followed a good sleep. She had just gotten to the uncomfortably preachy and terribly cringey climax in the story (which featured a tanned and curvy American named Trisha and a buff, even more tanned but not so curvy surfer dude from Australia named Johnn) in which Trisha’s nerdy-but-sexy cliché of a best friend was working on consoling her after Johnn’s sudden ending of their relationship to go pursue his dreams of winning a world championship (though Liselle knew that they would, of course come to in the end collapse into each other’s arms romantically and make out by the end of the book, weeping and expressing their deep woes and regrets) when she had inevitably fallen quite asleep, questioning why she still read these novels. Perhaps it was to give her some shadow of even a plastic romantic relationship - though no man had she ever found attractive.
The book had left her feeling as heavy as a log and incapable of coming to for quite some hours - it was that uninteresting and pointlessly passionate. She considered, in her waking moments buying another one, but she had no money to spare for a useless book, and she was already invested in that stupid story.
As her heavy eyelids fluttered open in a delicate manner that bothered her quite some lot - she was no princess, nor a damsel in distress, and a description such as that was no way to describe her! - Liselle noticed a throbbing pain right inside the centre of her forehead. The pain aggravated her, and as she attempted to clumsily stand up from the hardwood floor, she stumbled and found herself, quite suddenly, on the ground once again.
The first thought that was thought by this strange yet boring young woman was predictable in the place of panic and anxiety: it was, of course, I am dying. Followed by quite some cursing. Quite suddenly she felt a deep regret for not using her remaining money to go see a doctor, even a ‘doctor’ with blood stained still on his tools and no sort of medical degree apparent, and she also began to regret quite suddenly her absolutely boring and placid life in the dull city of Bremen. She had not accomplished just about anything in the twenty years she had been alive.
The headache grew, and it seemed to split her brain in two, the lobes separating slowly and sharply as though separated by a butcher knife. Black dots swam before Liselle’s eyes, first ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, and her vision went completely black.
Liselle’s bedroom slowly misted over with delicate film of blood and flesh, and a little girl stood next to Liselle’s small sleeping body. The tendrils of pure blood made into gas swirled softly around the girl, who parted a path in the low-lying fog and made her way over to Liselle. A silver knife handle could be seen now lying directly over Liselle’s brain, blood pooling on the paper-thin wound. The girl placed both of her hands on the handle, her raven-black hair which had been previously pinned up by a yellow flower at the very back of her small head falling loose, and she gently pulled the knife from Liselle’s head. And behind the girl appeared a young woman whom you may have seen before, and the woman placed her hands on the girls shoulders and turned her away to walk out of the door into the darkness beyond, and the woman took out a thin knife of her own. And the woman leaned down towards the sleeping body on the floor - and then she stabbed the blade into Liselle’s palm, straight through and piercing deeper than the flesh and bone of her soul.
The wound frosted over, and Liselle awoke with a startling glare, the blood mist and the curious visitors vanished. She now was fluent in Italian, and there was a sharp pain in the centre of her right palm.
