Part II, Dream I | Reality Rearranging

RULE ONE of Needle & Thread

The rules come unbound in human dreams.

❧☙

The capital of Purily sighed in relief when the clock struck midnight; from then until sunrise, every city light would be shut to black and every noise would fade to nothing but the quiet hum of the city generators. This hush fogged through the spiraling streets of the sinking city and became a silence for millions. A silence that masked a horrible truth.

Though on this very night, a little voice still whispered in the dark.

“Keep your eyes closed,” it said.

The voice was nearby, so I leaned over the frigid balcony rail and peered down into the street below; a small beam of light whipped across the cobbles. Equipped with nothing but a dim flashlight, a pair of young children stumbled through the dark together. A boy and girl, friends close like siblings.

There they are. I’d never been in a dream without people in it before, so I was wondering when they’d show up. But which one is my dreamer?

The boy’s hand was held tightly to the girl’s, who led the way ahead. “Alina, where are you taking me?”

“We're almost there, Oliver.”

I took a deep breath of cold dream air, and leapt off from that third-story balcony; here, my ankles didn’t crack and snap, and I could pop up and jog to catch up right away. Now that I was closer, I could actually tell what they looked like. As expected, they resembled the popular eugenics of the capital: pitch black hair, so black each strand nearly captured all light at every angle, and irises almost just as dark. But the two were different from each other; the boy seemed as if a black hole while the girl’s hair seemed… dyed, maybe? And perhaps those were black contacts in her eyes. So in the end, it was the boy that struck me in particular. His void-like hair was adorned with an assortment of starry hairpins and sparkles.

While admiring the work, I felt a scorching pain in my eye; it was the sensation of his needle through my cornea. Through the eye of this needle, an invisible thread wound me to him, and for a moment of lost control, the flesh of my face unwound into a frayed tapestry of memory. It took a few deep breaths for me to come back together again, as if I were a crocheted doll mended.

That confirmed it for me. It was definitely the boy’s dream. Or his memory? I must’ve had thousands of dreams, one for each night I ever lived, and each one I’ve seen someone new. Each one looked real and lived in real places and seemed like real people, and yet… I jabbed my fingers at their cheeks and poked at their sides. Hollow taps, like a glass wall stood between us.

“Hello,” I said aloud. “Nice weather we’re having.”

Of course, nobody responded. Nobody ever responded. But why did I care? Hear me or not, morning would come and I’d forget these two kids by afternoon.

But I followed these kids on their little adventure anyway. They continued their pointless trek toward the central spire. Of the Nine Cities, the peak of the capital reached the highest by far, even above the clouds. Meanwhile Vergalis, my own city, only reached about a sixth of that.

“You can open them now.” Alina tapped on Oliver’s shoulder. The pain I felt seared with the opening of those black eyes. The once-empty sky before us erupted with color and light, and the fantasy of it reminded me that it really was a dream in nature. Alina smiled and ruffled up Oliver’s hair from behind. “Well?”

“It’s the sky,” he said.

She smacked him upside the head. “And?”

“It’s wonderful.”

A meteor shower. Stars shot across the night sky and tumbled down from it. They were far up in the city, high up enough through the clouds that the view couldn’t be obscured. The pain in my eye remained, and in that pain I felt a memory:

A deafening downpour on a paved road in silver mist. A man whimpered for them to spare his life. Oliver pulled the grey cap down to hide his eyes. A trigger pulled, a muted shot sounded, and the man became silent. The red washed away in the rain, and they dragged the body away to dispose of it.

What could he do but watch? Watch, and in silent realization, dread at the knowledge that he’d one day be forced to pull the trigger himself. For so long, that memory clung to his chest like tar. But now the night sky poured such drops of delight from its black, something so bright and so beautiful that for the first time since that first gunshot sounded, the dread burned off him like the stars that sparked to nothing as they fell.

While we admired the sky together, the breeze caught the page of some distant diary and sent it tumbling near me, crinkling and lifting at my feet. For some reason, when I reached down to touch it, it didn’t reject me like everything else in my dreams. I held it up to the light of the night sky and read it; my heart churned with every word. I recognized that childlike handwriting right away, and it almost hurt me to see it again.

It made me remember her again. I remembered how the walls had been painted with a field of lilies, swaying with fictional breeze. I remembered cotton clouds. She’ll be back, I thought. Soon now, to take me home. In my imagination, she cradled me. Her gentle fingers rubbed the dark from my eyes, and her hum nursed my breath to stillness.

“They’re not coming back.”

That voice was like the whistle of a wind, sent to shrivel me up, sent from the lips of an autumn girl. I didn’t know why I remembered thinking autumn, but I did. She made me remember those distant sirens, again so that no matter how tightly I shut my eyes, I could see.

Mama’s not coming back?

The autumn girl noticed my sudden tears before I could, and reached forward to hug me. I remember the warmth of that hug to this day. I remembered it now, here with this night sky while reality rearranged itself in someone else’s dream.

Captured in the freedom of our own hearts, neither the children nor I could notice the approaching footsteps.

“Kids? This late after curfew?”

Oliver twisted around. There were two silhouettes, an adult man and woman. “Mopheads,” he muttered. “JANITORs.” The man stumbled and tripped up the stone stairwell, clearly drunk. Oliver stepped back to reach for Alina’s hand. “We have to—”

“Oliver?” the woman said. Suddenly, she seemed to recognize him, and now that she stepped closer into the light, he recognized her too. The sound of his name was what shook Alina awake, and she became the last to notice.

The man laughed as he shambled over to Oliver and poked at his hair clips. “What’s with this? You a little girl?”

But Oliver’s gaze was stuck frozen on the woman he knew. Even as the drunk one poked and prodded, even as the clips and glitter were ripped from his hair, still…

Alina stepped forward and smacked the mophead’s hand away. “Don’t touch him,” she said. The stars gave her glare a terrifying glint that even the mophead shuddered at. Even I shuddered at it.

“Oh-ho-ho,” he laughed. “Really?” Suddenly disinterested in Oliver, he reached forward to grip her cheek. “I can do whatever I want. I could turn you in, you—OW! You little—!” He shoved her to the concrete and kicked her in the gut, his hand indented from the bite. “That almost hurt, you brat!” He rammed his boot into her nose, and only then did she scream.

I backed away. I almost tripped on myself. A wall pressed up behind me and I shuddered and cowered. Why should I care?

Alina’s scream tore Oliver’s gaze free, and he turned back just in time to witness the next kick. A tooth clattered as it ripped away from her mouth and tumbled across the road. A little blood splattered across the cobblestones, illuminated by the light show that still played above. Like fireworks. And before the boom, while the specks of light scattered across them, Oliver remembered a moment a few months before now. He had been in his room and a spider crawled up beside his hand. He’d screeched in terror and tumbled from his chair. Concerned, Alina rushed into his room and smiled.

“Still afraid of bugs, Olly?”

“Stop…” Oliver said. The man was three times his size, and he knew that no matter how hard he punched, his fist would be the one to break.

Alina had placed a ginger finger beside the eight-legged creature and let it crawl into her hand. She walked it over to the window and let it free. And when she smiled, he thought about how that must’ve been what love looked like.

Her voice echoed in his head again now, again as he reached for his belt and unholstered his gun. Its black metal shimmered. I pressed my ears shut and the needle through my eye unwound me again. I could tell that the pistol felt comfortable in his grip. He’d glued the safety to stay on, but his thumb snapped it off with little effort now. He lined the man in his sights and hovered a finger near the trigger.

“Stop or I’ll shoot,” he said. The voice was enough to chill the mophead sober. He turned to the boy, then to his partner. She was backed into the shadows, closer to me. A trail of sweat ran down the man’s temple when he realized that she didn’t plan on interfering.

“We both know,” he said. “That thing can’t hurt me.” His eyes searched the grooves of the tiles on the platform for confidence. It may have been true before, but even Alina’s teeth managed to make marks in his skin now. Then he laughed, suddenly as if he found a solution in those grooves. “You’re her pupil, aren’t you? I outrank you. Hear my voice, child, and stand down.”

Oliver shuddered with the command. The needle in me and the thread between us both quivered, and he put the gun down. He kneeled. The man smirked, unholstered his own gun, and pointed it at Oliver, whose body shivered as if struggling to fight something.

“I’m not going back down there,” the mophead mumbled. His finger curled around the trigger, just about to fire until Alina, blood streaming down her face, grabbed onto his ankle and yanked. It did nothing to him, but he flicked the barrel toward her instead, and—“Still afraid?”—BOOM.

The lights in the sky burned away like embers; the body crumpled.

I collapsed to my knees and tried to look away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to wake up, but I couldn’t. The other JANITOR, the woman, left my side and gripped the body by the arms to drag it away. She offered Oliver a dithering glance, and sighed. “Sorry.” That’s all she said.

When they were gone, Oliver tossed his smoking gun aside and rushed to his friend. Hands trembling, he checked for a pulse. He put an ear to her chest, a finger to her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was strained and quiet, and tears streamed down her cheeks to clean the blood from her face. The world flickered, and suddenly it was like they had swapped places. What was dream, and what was reality? Here now, Alina slept, and Oliver cried. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “Forgive me?”

But she couldn’t.

This high above the clouds, there was never any rain and the stars had long since disappeared. Only black night remained.

Oliver continued to cry, and even as I could see a reality in which he carried her in his arms to the nearest medbox, when I reached out to him, the glass that had trapped me for so long finally shattered. My footsteps were silent up until I touched his shoulder and pulled myself forward to embrace him from behind. I held him tight, and my words drifted into his ear as whispers. “It’s only a dream,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s just a dream.”

He stopped crying and stared straight ahead. For some reason, I felt like if there were a mirror there, he’d be looking right at me, but that was impossible. Nobody from any other dream could see—

“If you’re a dream,” he said, “will I remember you when I wake?”

I shuddered, because I didn’t know the answer. Because it was a question I’d wanted to ask so many times before.

“It hurts,” my autumn girl had said. “Love should be forever.”

Her embrace was so warm, and so much like Mama’s last embrace that I remember thinking, “Will you be my forever, then?”

An autumn girl became my first and best friend, and I couldn’t even recall her name, nor why she was autumn to me. After she found her own new family and left me behind, I would always stare out the glass doors of the orphanage every morning at dawn, thinking of our first and last kiss. The curse of glass is that you see right through it. I imagined that I could see her too, but there was nothing to see out there in those months. Nothing but the trees with leaves that looked like fire.

Huh. Maybe that’s why. I wanted to see her again. Even though I couldn’t remember. I remember how important she is to me. I want to meet her again, so—

Oliver smiled as if he could hear my thoughts. “Maybe we’ll meet again too.”

❧☙

Dear Anna,

I’m sorry for leaving you all alone at Lucky Lilies. I had a lot of fun when we lived together. It was like were a real family. I want to write a letter every to you. Maybe when we’re both adults, we can read them together.

Love,

your autumn girl.