The Dreaming Girl

Under the afternoon sun, I fold my wings into my body and descend to a tiny, dilapidated hut. It’s in such disrepair that I believe it might collapse from a brush against my wings. So, prudent as I am, I shrink to the comfortable size of these common bipedal folk. The sun still casts a blistering heat, which my scales no longer shield me from. The heat of the arid land wafts into visible wisps. I grow increasingly squeamish in my humanoid form and hastily knock on the hut’s door now looming over me. But two knocks on its rotting surface are enough for it to creak inward. Just before I can apologize, a voice comes from within.

“Come! Come in! Oh, I’ve forgotten to lock the door!”

A young woman scampers into the doorway. She looks about the same height as I am, with ashen hair so long and ragged I assume she rarely bathes. The colors of her shirt have so worn out that they now blur into a murky grey. Her shorts are so torn they look like thorns. Her scarred hands, meanwhile, feel abrasive to the touch. I yield to soft pricks as she takes my hands into her own and squeezes happily. Her eyes gleam beneath disarranged bangs. When paired with a wide smile, I see an innocent character in contrast to her physical appearance. After seating me before a fireplace of cinder and wood ash, she seals the door with a latch.

The sun’s harsh hues now cease to be in my view. As my eyes adjust to this cool shade, dim sparks from the center illuminate an unreservedly decorated interior. A bucket of fresh water sits beside a spacious pantry. An old sickle sits inside a jute basket. Kitchen utensils mingle with daggers. Countless rusting picture frames are nailed to the walls in an undiscernible manner. The air is thick with a metallic smell. When the woman approaches, I withdraw my thoughts to myself, feeling guilty of blatantly scrutinizing the place. She sits down cross-legged, just as I have.

“Dear traveler, why are you here, so far away from civilization? I wonder.” She passes to me a stone cup filled with clear water.

I reply, “I walked by, hoping this could be a shortcut to the next town. I think I’ve traveled too far off the main road.” I smile like an ignorant traveler. “Will the sun set before I make it to the next town?”

“You’d be better off not gambling on that chance. Did you happen to lose your gear as well?”

“Yes.” I scratch my head, ashamed. “Maybe I could stay the night here.”

I am acutely aware that she’s been fixated on my body, if not on my eyes, ever since she sat down. She examines me as if I’m on display at the butcher’s shop. The whistling wind arrives at the forefront of my attention, only breaking when the woman, unaware of the torturous pause she’d allowed, nods her head.

Her charcoaled lips part gently between cheeks stretched with glee. “Alright,” she says. It is a soft acceptance in tone—softer than in her usual voice.

I twiddle my thumbs, playing with the unfamiliarly thin and fragile sensation of a human’s limbs. My nails scratch each other in turn. Finding it unnatural to not have shared our names, I had asked the woman for her own. However, she said it’d be better to talk over food. I sit to her side, watching her tend to a stone pot atop the reinvigorated fire. I ask if I can help. She pouts and tells me to sit patiently as a guest. Her movements are calm and precise. When the pot whistles, she lifts the lid off with her bare hands and pours washed rice into bubbling water. Then, she places a flat stone tablet—a makeshift table—before the fireplace and neatly arranges two pairs of chopsticks. Water splashes onto the dirt ground as she squeezes and dilutes pickled lettuce in a bowl, after which she pours into the pot. The scents mingle to overcome the rusting metals. The air nips at the skin when she finally takes the pot off the fire; I think the sun has set. I try to provoke some small talk when the table is set for dinner. She shakes her head and says, “When we eat.” It is a blunt response through which I sense some maternity. Though, strangely, she looks to not have a child of her own.

My hands cup a bowl of thin congee. Its heat enters me through naked skin. It is a treasurable heat in the evening breeze that whistles through the walls. The fire grows dim once more. I watch her, light flickering on one half of her face, as I eat.

“I like to cook. When I cook, my mind is stolen from this place. It is the smell of food that I find engaging in my loneliness. Its present nature whisks away the smell of memories for a brief, precious moment.” She glances at walls now veiled by the evening dark. “I don’t remember when I’d first hung these pictures. If I touch them, I feel a longing for the unknown. Something encroaches from a chasm in my heart, threatening to pull me from the now. So, I leave the frames, and the pictures within, as they are. I cannot bear to discard them. They have remained for so long that I fear moving them would change something for the worse.

“I also like the dark. Here, where the light of this fire reigns over the sun and the moon, I see nothing else but its ever-changing shape. It reminds of time passing, that the world moves on, while this interior remains unchanging, the taste and smell of blood forever emanating from these rusting frames.

“I don’t remember why I first came here, but I—”

Her voice quivering, she breaks her gaze from the light and cups my face before her own. I am hurt by her hands again, but her face strikes me as more interesting than ever. As she stares into my eyes, the flushness in her cheeks dissipates. Her eyes widen as if waking from a reverie. Her mask stabilizes into one of rigidity. She releases me from her hold and, after licking her dry lips, continues speaking.

“This quiet place rarely sees travelers. They often leave something behind—Inert Twine, Halicer Mushrooms, spools of red thread—things I can’t usually enjoy since I live here in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t recall my name, so my last visitor lent me her own in exchange for a place to stay. That night, she told me a story of how her parents came to that name. She told of her childhood. She told me of her dreams and ambitions, too. I couldn’t help but envy these foreign memories, so I begged her to tell me in more detail such that I might justify taking her name. I treasure that warmth as my own, now, though it fades like the fire before us. Perhaps it's fear of losing this name’s meaning that keeps me awake for the next traveler.”

“But what of your memories of your past? Are they not as important as well?” I ask.

She looks, again, at her pictures and heaves a sigh. Words dance on her tongue. Her mouth parts, then closes in indecision. As if to stifle a strange, other fear, she hastily follows through: “I don’t know.” Her voice is soft, almost indecipherable. “I... don’t want to know what I’ve lost.”

“I think of this bliss I have now and wonder why I would ever break it. Would you break the fragile present if you could? I cannot bear that pain. Perhaps these pictures are like stamps to me, signifiers of things that were real, and nothing more. They belong to me as they are. I should have the right to do with them as I wish.”

“Often, we think it best to forget the past so to move on. It is a fallacy. We become too fixated on the act of moving on that, ironically, we remain as we were. After all, what could’ve helped us grow is what’s left behind. We grow by acknowledging our past. But, at the core of it all, life is about change and embracing its volatility for the betterment of our selves. Surely you could find good in recovering your past, after having remained as you were for so long.”

“But is my past truly my own if I can barely remember it? I feel as detached from these supposed memories as I am from the world. If I can’t even remember a speck of them, how are they any different than the memories of my visitors? Perhaps my past needn’t concern the present me. I have no obligation to remember. Still, perhaps you might enjoy in forgetting as well. This fear of losing meaning—it keeps me invigorated. The constant, unceasing search excites me. I cannot ask for more than the perpetual search in this blissful vacuum.”

“Your happiness feels born from complacency.”

“But I have achieved one of perpetuity. That is enough for me.”

I place my empty bowl on the table. The last taste of pickled lettuce leaves my tongue. I ask if I can lay down and rest. She unfurls a towel. Laying down, I see a gap where vapor escapes. There, the starless sky looks stitched to the ceiling. Sounds of shuddering planks and crackling fire soon vanish from my consciousness. Within this vacuum, I am overcome by a human sense of time. It is human fear I feel as well. In this shrunken state, ephemerality feels so apparent, and a human appreciation of it encroaches my mind. Shades of orange scatter through smoke to perform a wild but vague dance over wood and metal along the wall. I count each flicker against the beat of my heart, bemoaning the dying light. Time hastens in enrapturing moments. I am lured to expect the woman’s voice to shatter this silence in any second. But nothing comes. Soon, I am paralyzed by the falling smell of metal and my cyclical expectancy of her voice. In the corner of my eye, I glimpse the woman with the fire behind her. There is a moment of blindness before the veil uncovers its secrets, though I uncover nothing at the time as the dead flame takes me altogether with its light.

Should I recall her eyes later, I tell myself that I will be reminded of the deceitful nature of her virginity. That purity meant nothing but an absence from light. Thus, the gleam I saw was not indicative of her heart per se, but rather of what little escapes from a chasm whose bottom has never once been touched by light. It’s to the vanished light that I awake. Her palms cover my ears. Her legs kneel on either side of my body. Her forehead touches mine. At this distance, I see eyes pouring scorn. Her tears blend with mine when they fall into my eyes. Uneven breaths brush against my now charcoaled lips. When I sit up with her enervated body, she leans back and leans her head into mine. In the darkness, I heard an unconscious monologue of a confession.

I grew up as Yvette in a village far from here. I don’t know where it is. Women in this village weren’t permitted to travel or learn, so it was never necessary to know the name of this village. We were only tools for a master, though a kind old maid would pass us books to read under the moonlight. The day I became of age, they took me away from the others and taught me the touch of a man. For every waking day afterward, I would sleep with an unfamiliar man in that dark, window-less bedroom. I never became pregnant. They whipped me when they realized I was sterile, as if hurting me would make me ovulate. Since they had no use for women as entertainment, they took me blindfolded to a cliff and left me to jump on my volition. I didn’t jump, of course. I couldn’t jump after not even knowing what life really was. Still, I had no ability to survive on my own. For the first couple days, I lived off food that I’d hidden in my clothes. I starved afterward. In good time, a peddler wandered by and took pity. He offered to take me with him. In return, he would bed me. It was when our foreheads touched that I realized I could sap his memories. Hungry for a life that could be my own, I stole his past, until he remained nothing more than a husk whose memories now belonged to me.

I took his identity, in mind and in spirit, and moved into a nearby town. He was a single man, with no siblings, and traveled often. All that was perfect as I needed only dress like a man and act like him in a totally new town, his memories having overwritten my own. I drummed up a nice fortune with his wares and moved into a sizeable house. Those were, in some ways, the happiest days of my life: I slept, ate, and dressed however I wanted to. Unfortunately, as time wore on, I realized these memories expiring. I grew increasingly conscious that the way I wanted to act became how this identity wanted to act. And, one day, these stolen memories disappeared altogether. I no longer knew the men I drank with, the town I lived in, nor the bed I slept in. I couldn’t even remember Yvette’s childhood memories. I was now much like that man who I’d stolen from, but with a hunger for connection. Nostalgia for those days, let alone the literal desire to recall memories, haunted me as I was suddenly left with nothing but a blank slate. So, I instinctively dragged a passing woman into an alleyway, stole her memories, and discarded her body in the sewers. This was the way I lived for a couple years—changing identities when my time was up or when I garnered too much suspicion.

You would think this lifestyle could go on forever. It felt like it could, for a time. However, the true me began to desire something more eternal. Meanwhile, the feeling of gaining some new memory began to grow dull. My lack of excitement is why I’ve arrived here. These walls are decorated with photographs of people I have once been. Their dazed looks now remind me of how I’ve usurped them. But in my ambiguous state, which I’d long endured here, I recalled nothing but nostalgia. In these moments of inaction, stasis of my mind, body, and spirit, I did not grow. I did not change. I merely remained. And if the rare traveler wandered by? I’d frame a memory of them on these walls. Even in this state, this remnant of my last identity, I could not remember who I truly was. I could only remember who others were. When that, too, disappeared, I enjoyed in the gap of nothingness.

Sunlight peers in from the ceiling gap. The day’s wind refuses to blow in, however. I find our positions separated and that we’ve returned to where we rightfully belong in this nauseating interior. The smell of metal now suffocates. We cough together. I stumble toward the door, but she yanks at my makeshift shirt.

“What have you done?” It is a screech far removed from yesterday’s civility.

The idea of telling her my assumption frustrates me—I know it would be of no help to her. For her, perhaps, there remains only one reason to continue living her ephemeral life—that is, the desire to know why she has lost her illusory eternity. So, I think I should permit her this mercy: a strangling search rather than a painful answer.

I cannot release my shirt from her hold, so she is dragged to the doorway, wailing all the while. When high noon light floods in, she winces, screams like an uncivilized creature, and retreats to a corner of her suffocating hut. I step into the heat now comforting compared to the chilling interior. As I grow and cast off the form of the ephemeral, I’m reminded of complicity in apathy. At the peak of my emotions, I unleash a torrent of fire that eviscerates her last home. The smell of metal and blood lingers but for a moment, before vanishing into the heat of the earth. Her memories subsequently remain only with me. As does her name which, even in her dying thoughts, probably meant nothing to her.