I awoke in a cold sweat, heart racing. I
had had the dream again. It seemed now
every night my sleep was interupted with the
memories of my past. Childhood feelings,
childhood thinking, but we had ceased to be
children that summer afternoon. Everything,
so faded in my mind...

I sat up in bed, bent over and cradled
my head in my hands. Trying to
remember....remember what? My temples
pounded, my brain didn’t want me to
remember. These dreams were so common,
why did I now have the urge to figure out
what they meant? I let out a moan of pain,
the headache escalating into torturous
migraine. I reached my left arm to the side
table, and instead of grabbing the bottle of
prescription pain pills, I instead knocked over
my alarm clock.

The mechanism crashed to the ground,
the metal bells clanked on the hard wood
floor. Frantically, I flailed my arms back
towards the table, eyes shut, searching,
hopelessly searching for the pills. A hand
closed on something. A bottle. My eyes flew
open and examined the bottle. Naproxin, yes
these would do. I popped a few in my mouth
and swallowed, I was accustomed to
performing this task without water.

With my sensory nerves on their way to
being dulled, I slipped out from under the
covers of the bed, stood, and walked over to
the mirror. Leaning my hands on the
mohagony dresser, I rested my forehead
against the cool glass of the mirror. My eyes
were bloodshot, as they usually looked after
having run through my mind, chasing night
terrors that weren’t there.

Absently, I reached down and felt a knob
of one of the dresser drawers. Closing my fist
around the knob, I pulled the drawer out, and
looked unto its contents. I blinked for a
minute, seeing something that didn’t quite
make sense in my brain.

After fully removing the drawer from the
dresser, I fell back onto the bed, and sat there
with the drawer in my lap. I stroked the grain
of the wood, and looked up to the mirror. I
felt into the box, and watched the reflection of
myself do the same. I felt around for the
small flannel pouch. Rubbing my fingers
across the material, mocked by the
otherworld me on the other side of the room, I
opened the pouch.

Taking my eyes off of the mirror, I spilled
out whatever was in the small bag on the
bed, right next to my left thigh. I watched my
hands comb over the small jewels and
charms that were lying next to me, hands that
were soft to the touch, yet hands that had a
wealth of knowledge to them. Cuticles bitten,
ends of some fingers bloody from teeth
turned cannibal, it was my paranoia that
provoked this.

I hid my fingers from view, tucked into
my hand. I saw what had confused me
before. A small tetragonal crystal, no bigger
than an Aggie marble. I extended my
extremities once more, and fingered the
crystal. It was as cool as the mirror, and I
placed the crystal against my cheek. My eyes
closed and I slipped into dream. It seemed
my memory would be restored...

The dream continued where it left off,
this had never happened before. The
plaguing dream of the past had never finished
itself, and I could never remember what had
happened once we left the house of Choko. I
felt a light heat against my cheek, but paid it
no mind as the past returned.

(Four girls, jogging down the
neighborhood streets. En route to the house
of the one named Nene. A large western
style home, they were greeted by happy
parents that knew nothing of the girl’s
troubles. Milk? Cookies? No, trivial matters
such as snacks could not be trifled with.
Nene what’s wrong with your eyes, have you
been crying? Don’t worry mom...nothing’s
wrong. What a lie. To the attic. Girls, don’t
stay up there long, the dust isn’t good for your
lungs.

No heed to that warning, that was the
least of the girl’s worries. In the attic, box
after box piled on top of one another. Ancient
photo albums set out, records of family
lineage strewn over the floor. I strained to
remember, to urge the dream to continue.

No, not in this box. Not that one either.
Maybe this one? No, only old burlesque
costumes. Where’d your parent’s dig this
stuff up anyway, Nene? One girl, a strong
one with brown hair blew the dust off of one
particularly old looking photo album. She
coughed, and with wheezing breath
commanded the others to join her in looking
over the album. Pages yellowed with age,
the cardboard binding was rotting and stank
of mold.

Flipped open the album, first lithographs
filled the pages, stuck with some vile
adhesive that had seeped through either side
of each page, discoloring the book in such a
grotesque way. A girl with black hair and
eyes the color of the sea stopped the brown
haired girl from her reckless flipping of pages.)

It was me.

(She placed a hand on top of one page,
and felt something. A weird heat emanating
from the book. Carefully, she turned the
page. A papercut momentarily distracted her.
She looked up from her bleeding finger,
looking at the photo she had come across. It
was a mural. Someone had photographed an
elaborate painting from somewhere...)

The dream started to fade, things got
fuzzy, and my eyes popped open. I strained
to recall the details of the picture, there was
something startling about it, I simply couldn’t
place it. I then remembered the heat on my
cheek, the warmth I had felt before slipping
into dreams of the past.

My cheek now burned in the spot where
I held the crystal. Immediately, I moved the
hand that grasped the crystal away from my
cheek. I rubbed my face. The heat was
gone, all that was left was a red mark under
the right eye. I peered down at the crystal. It
was ice cold in my hand.

I closed my fingers around the exquisite
jewel, and replaced all other contents of the
felt pouch in their original locations. Sitting,
alone on my bed, emotions flowed like a river
through my heart. Feelings I didn’t
understand... feelings that must have had to
do with the past.

How I wished I could remember! My
eyes opened, a passionate, almost angry
sound tore itself from my throat and escaped
my lips. My hand closed tight around the
crystal. Tighter it held that small object, til I
could feel its edges cutting into my flesh.
Deeper and deeper sank the crystallin
sharpness, every second the next agony
distracting me from the previous. Scarlet
nectar seeped onto my sheets, turning darker
as it pooled, and ultimately became absorbed,
in my bed.

A tear rolled down my cheek. I could
taste saline on my lips, and phlegm rose from
its dank hiding place in my throat to greet my
tongue, a mixture of wretched flavors perhaps
only to be relished by the most depraved of
men.

I released the crystal from my grip,
letting it bouce to the floor, staining the carpet
with my blood as it settled. The dream from
the past troubled me, I was hoping it would
have continued in it’s entirety. But, of course,
it’s entirety was the whole of what happened
that summer, and I didn’t want to delve that
deep into my psyche, not just yet.

I brought back the image of the painting
in the picture to my mind, and although it was
progressively becoming harder to retrieve
detail, I could see enough. The faded image
of four young women, shadowed with age
and my flawed memory. The girls were
decked out, seemingly, in medieval armor...
and then I could remember nothing else. The
dream was cursed, but for some reason, at
this point in time, it was urging to be acted
upon.

I slipped off from the bed, and curled up
on the floor. My hands once more found the
crystal, and clutched it close, hoping the heat
would return... to finish the dream. I would
have no such luck.

Coming soon: Part 2