Part II, Dream II | Hell Under Heaven

RULE TWO of Needle & Thread

Only those with open hearts may be freely sewn.

❧☙

“And that, my girl, is how you change a car’s oil.” Darius Aryo snapped off his nitrile gloves and tossed them onto the driveway. “This car’s oil, at least.”

Samira patted him on the back. “Good work, Dad. But you should know, these kinds of cars won’t even be on the road in five years.”

“Bah,” he said with a wave of his hand. There was something magical about the car anyway. Something almost human about its single round headlights and its nose-like flat grill. The paint was colored buttermilk, and had a wet shine like it was still brand new. Twelve-year-old Samira was only kind of right. In the present, nobody built cars like this anymore. Yet in most of the Midtown now, the people held onto their old and kept them working for as long as they could. It was still just barely more common to find a car with an engine on the road than a car without.

Samira ran her fingers along the smooth waxed surface of the hood. “It may be going obsolete,” she continued on her own. “But well… I still love it.” She flashed him a handsome smile, then skipped over to the driver’s side door. “Next, can you teach me how to drive it?”

Darius smiled back and fished into his pocket for the keys, but another car careened into the driveway before he could. The brakes squeeled for it to stop just before the garage door, and a woman popped out in a huff.

“I’m tired of this shit,” she muttered beneath her breath.

Darius’s face fell, and he followed her back into the house, reaching out to console her. “Cassie…”

The passenger side door opened after the house’s front door slammed shut, and another girl who looked like a smaller Samira stepped out.

“Arima, what happened?” Samira touched the back of her little sister’s hand, but the girl refused to look her in the eye.

“Mommy is mad at Daddy again,” she said.

Samira tried a smile to cheer her up, but it didn’t work. “Again? What happened this time?”

“It’s all my fault.” She trembled slightly. “It’s all because I begged Daddy to take me to the festival last night even though Mommy already said no.”

“Come on, this happens all the time. It’ll blow over by tomorrow.”

She shook her head. “Whenever Mommy takes me out with her, she always talks about how much she can’t wait to leave. You’ll stay with me, won’t you, she says. And I never respond because… because it feels like if I did, it would come true. I can’t stay with her, âbji. She’s always so, so angry.”

“It won’t come to that,” Samira assured her again, but dark clouds were rolling in, and she wasn’t sure of the words she spoke herself.

Darius Aryo was the brother of the Duke of Conda, but he stepped down from up high to marry Lady Cassie Fellow, a beautiful woman of a lower house in Vergalis, far from home. Layer 2 was just under heaven, but it was there they were to carve heaven again. That was the ideal that Samira held in her heart as she followed her parents back into the house, little sister’s hand in hers. It was the ideal she held when the heaven under heaven became like hell instead.

“Let me ask you girls again,” Cassie said. “You’re going to stay here with me, right?”

Only I could see how Samira unraveled with those words. She froze and trembled, melted and froze again, over and over again in the span of five seconds. Arima was already crying, and she clung to her older sister like she had nothing left. Darius sat in the corner, sunken and silent.

“I’ll stay with you, mom,” she finally said. “But Arima, she got invited to that elite girls’ academy in Conda. It’s the chance of a lifetime, and she’s so smart… it’d be a waste for her to stay here.”

Cassie Fellow was surprised, but she failed to be angry. She asked the usual housekeeping questions like, “Why was I never told about this?” and, “Is that what she really wants to do?” but since she could not argue against it being better for her daughter, she couldn’t disagree.

Of course, it was mostly a lie. There was no invitation from that specific, prestigious academy that was assumed when she mentioned it, but the lie slipped from her tongue so easily, she almost felt proud of it. And relieved, when her mother believed it.

I took a deep breath to collect myself before continuing down the dream. I opened the front door again and stepped out onto the driveway. A week passed when I crossed the threshold, and Darius and Arima were packing the car with their belongings. Samira watched and made jovial conversation with them, but there was a hollow in her chest they couldn’t see. A hollow that grew wider when they drove off in that old car she worried she’d never see again.

I stepped up and peered into her hollow chest, where my vision narrowed into nothing but its blackness before unfolding again into another memory.

A mother and a daughter sat across from a father and a son from a different family. The mother introduced her daughter to the father’s son. They shook hands, and just like that, 16-year-old Samira Aryo was betrothed to the 20-year-old Baron Allen March, and Cassie Fellow’s status returned from low nobility to nigh royalty again. Supposedly, Samira’s separation from her lord father made her lose the grace of House Aryo, but the March boy was smitten regardless.

So smitten that I hesitated to open the bedroom door of this girl whose dream I roamed. My hand settled on the brass doorknob, which felt like glass and hollow to the touch. “Samira?” I tried to call out, but I could tell she couldn’t hear me. I banged my head against the door and listened to her stifled sobs and the rustling of clothes.

“It won’t hurt next time,” the young baron said.

Overwhelmed with disgust, I jerked myself away from the door, and another memory greeted me. At the hallway’s end, a brief evening shine cast a bloody yolk spotlight to the top of the stairwell, where Samira collapsed over and curled up into a ball. A wooden painting stick chased after her and struck her beneath the ribs.

Her mother raised the stick up to strike again, and Samira’s curling tightened when it struck her again. She barely made a sound. “You called off the engagement!” Cassie screamed. “Without! Even! Telling! Me!” She struck her daughter between every word, and each strike made a bruise on her flesh, and each bruise brought tears to Samira until she broke down into silent sobs.

“Mom…” she choked out. “Please…”

Seeing her daughter laid out onto the floor, holding her ears and shaking while curled up into a ball, for some reason made her even angrier. Like, “trying so hard to make me feel sorry for you!” So she raised the stick again and struck her one last time on the back of the neck. Samira finally howled in pain, and satisfied, the mother tossed the stick away and huffed off back downstairs.

Samira remained at the top of the stairwell, unmoving until the last of that ugly evening orange faded into the twilight hues, and she found the strength to pick herself up and head back to her room. Every part of her ached, and I could feel that pain for myself more with every moment I lingered in this horrible dream.

When she opened the door to her room, I entered with her. Upon my first step into her bedroom, I could already feel something sacred about it. At a glance, it simply appeared to be a mess of trinkets and tapestries. An ugly smattering of things organized by someone who seemed to care little for them. But it was almost too obvious to me that she cared very much for every little thing here, and each random item had a million memories baked into it. Memories whose whispers touched me in this memory I already wandered.

Samira curled up onto her bed in the same position she assumed when her mother had been hitting her. She groaned lightly as the bruises started to set in, and patches of her skin turned a deep purple. I took a seat beside her on the bed and tried to soothe her aches, but her skin still felt like glass to me. Why was it that Oliver’s dream was the only one I could interact with?

Her phone buzzed on her nightstand, but she didn’t move to answer it. She let it buzz and flash for fifteen seconds before it shut off, and Samira sighed in relief. Then almost right away, it started to ring again, so I stood up to check it.

“It’s Arima,” I said aloud, and like she could hear me, Samira suddenly reached up to grab the phone and answer it.

“You picked up!” her little sister said through the speakers. “I told you I wanted to call tonight.”

Samira smiled lightly. “Sorry. I was in the bathroom.” Her voice was a little gravelly, but she managed an upbeat tone.

“Did you wake up from a nap recently?”

“Just a short one. School has been a little tough on me lately.”

“I know what you mean. I stay up late doing homework all the time nowadays. Hold on, Dad’s calling me. Oh! Do you want me to put him on for you?”

“No, I spoke with him yesterday.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back.”

Samira rolled onto her back and let the phone rest on her chest. She took deep breaths, like it had taken great effort to sound as composed as she did. Eventually, the phone’s speakers gave off a staticky rustling, a sign that Arima had returned to the phone again from across the world, and Samira practiced stretching her face into a smile. “Arima? Do you have fun over there?”

“Yes!” she answered right away. “Oh it has its struggles, but it’s really wonderful. It somehow feels even more like home here. Like we have a rich history with a family that goes back generations. Oh, I wish you could see the Mountain for yourself. We’re the only one of the Nine Cities that still has natural land, you know. Isn’t that cool? I’ve also been learning Farsa. I mean, Dad’s taught us a little since we were young, but there’s so much you just don’t learn without constantly being surrounded by native speakers. Âbji, I really want you to come visit. Ask Mom, okay? This summer, you definitely have to come visit.”

As her sister continued to speak on the phone, Samira kept still, those waves of black and red emanating from her. Every emotion that she felt was clear to me. Longing, irritation, jealousy, hate, love. Yearning, indignation, envy, love, hate. And she hated herself for feeling this way. “I can’t remember any of the Farsa that Dad taught us,” she mumbled.

Arima went silent for a moment. “Are you okay, âbji?”

“Mmm, I’m fine,” she said, but to me, it was obvious that she was on the brink of tears. “Just a little tired.”

Maybe she could tell as well, even through the phone and a million miles away, because she went silent again. “Okay. I’ll let you sleep.” The static that separated the sisters communicated an imperfect breath. A breathing so irregular, so blended with noise that for a moment, Samira believed she already hung up. “I love you, âbji. More than anything. Goodnight.”

The phone clicked, and the call ended. The skin of her chest burned with her phone resting there, and she turned over onto it in bed, gripping onto her knees to cry herself to sleep.

I sighed deeply and walked back out of the room. The time I left disappeared into the present. Samira was an adult scholar at Arys Academy, and I was in my own bedroom in that secret living space that Ms. Lyre let me stay in. I could even watch myself sleep, there in the dark, dreaming a dream of myself dreaming. An infinite loop that had me living a present while still asleep.

“I don’t know what to do,” I muttered to myself. “How do I make things better?” I giggled to myself madly, high on emotion from what I just witnessed. “What did I ever have before to complain about? Compared to this girl…”

On the nightstand by my sleeping body, there was a sheet of notebook paper that I hadn’t noticed there before I went to bed. Was it a note from Ms. Lyre? The paper felt so light when I picked it up, and I felt the weight of my burden lighten as I read its words. It was an old letter, just like from the last dream I remembered. It made me feel nostalgic, and hopeful, and sad all at once. As I finished the last words, penned with a lovely swirl, the glass of the dream shattered all at once. The air felt realer, just like it had in the waking world. “Now it shatters,” I said.

Filled with courage then, I dashed out of my bedroom, through the hall and past the living room, back out those armoire doors and into the counseling room that Ms. Lyre had set up for me. I ran and ran, back out into the school at night, halls illuminated by soft sconce lights. I had never been to the dormitories, but there were hundreds of threads wandering around me. Being so near to her memories, Samira’s thread was easy to pick out among them. I gripped onto it tight and followed it to its origin. Up three flights of stairs and down many halls, I finally reached my destination.

She was walking down the hall alone, a neutral expression on her face, on her way back to her room for the night. It was already midnight, but she didn’t look all that tired. Her eyes widened when she noticed me down the hall, reeling her invisible thread in like she were a fish until I reached her and gripped her by the shoulders.

“Annamarie?!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

I was completely out of breath somehow, even though my real body was still asleep in that bedroom. My lungs burned, and it all felt so incredibly real. And she could see me, and she could hear me. “Break up with your boyfriend,” I said. “Or don’t, if you think it can work. Just—”

“Hold on,” she interrupted. “What’s up with you, all of a sudden?”

I was crying. How embarrassing. I could barely breathe and my face was snotting up, and my tears dripped onto the lenses of my glasses. “Your suffering isn’t normal! Stop trying to trick yourself into believing that. Get angry! You don’t deserve any less than anyone else!” I broke out into a coughing fit and collapsed to the floor. “Live your life to the fullest.”

❧☙

Dear Anna,

The days without you grow ever more weary. Every day, I wish I never left you. I’ve been feeling so lonely, and I want nothing more than to hear you sing to me. At night, I cry in fear that I’ll never get to see you again. Do you cry for me too?

Love,

your autumn girl.