a white horse standing in the center of my bedroom
It started with the party, or maybe, it started with an absence.
She had been complaining about the howling void that opened up in the pit of her stomach and screamed for sentience, threatening to consume her entirely, leaving her numb and paralyzed and blind, for nearly a year. When he got sick of it, he invited her to the party.
It was a place where everybody knew everybody and everyone was “networking”. A strange place, one she was alien to due to a profoundly antisocial nature and a deep shyness that nobody believed she possessed except her. Shouting and music and laughter which she remained outside of, observing all that went by her in a sort of fugue state. She was very drunk and trying to hide it. Everybody was talking and only she was listening, but she could only catch snatches of conversation.
“He just sold it for $20 mil…”
“Calvin Klein?”
“It’s a totally radical reclaiming -”
“Have you had the dream too?”
This final snippet forced the world into a singular pinpoint of focus. When she turned to face the speaker, she was met with nothing but light.
A tall boy, very tall, too tall, tall and blond and vaguely misshapen somehow, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps his skeleton outgrew his skin.
“I’m sorry?”
He smiled, all teeth, a carnivore’s mouth, sharp and pointy and blindingly white. When he leaned in close, his breath smelled metallic. She recoiled instinctually, sensing something rapacious in his grin.
“The dream. I know you’ve had it.”
Maybe he was high. Everyone kept talking loudly about how many lines they’d down, how much they needed another bump, something false in their recital but desperate, too. When she didn’t answer, he kept going.
“The factory. The one outside Pittsburg. The smokestacks. Fumes from the gasoline soaking into the earth. Making you dizzy. Making you sick. The fire. The fire that consumes the factory. And in the fire, the girl. The beautiful girl with the mouthful of blood.”
Dumbfounding. Earth-shattering. She stared at him as though he were a prophet. His grin only widened.
“I’ve been sending them to you.”
And with that, he walked away. Disappeared into the endless crowd.
-
When she got home that night, she was shivering. She always shivered when she was drunk, teeth chattering so hard it created cracks in the enamel, but this shiver was primordial in nature. A deep repulsion to the predator outside the window. Watching. She got straight into bed, still dressed, and left all the lights on. Sleep did not find her.
-
She asked the man who had invited her if he knew the hunter. He laughed, told her, “He’s been my best friend since I was ten years old.” She frowned.
“He told me he was sending me dreams.”
“Yeah, he was probably trying to hit on you.”
She dropped it, but the hole in her gut grew wider. Its edges were starting to bleed.
-
That night, she dreamed. And it was exactly as he had said. She was standing in a desolate part of the country, grey and abandoned, the air crisp. In front of her, made hazy by smog, towered the smokestacks. She knew them. Used to drive out to them when she grew restless as a teenager, stand for hours before them and smoke. Now, they were dark and imposing, rising up out of the starless night like sentinels guarding the true oblivion that lay beyond.
She wrinkled her nose, prickled by gasoline. Yes. The gasoline. The gasoline that soaked into the mud, became part of it, unifying the unconscious with the real. Heat began to envelop her skin, warming her slowly at first, than ravaging her like a fever. The night lit up, blackness giving way to an apocalyptic orange, noxious and nuclear in its brightness. A burning that was not a burning at all, but rather an unmaking, or more precisely, a remaking.
From the flames came the girl.
The girl was not beautiful. This the hunter had lied about. She was simply a negative image of the dreamer, light where she was dark and dark where she was light. Staticky around the edges. When the girl opened her mouth, black blood spilled out in torrents.
-
She opened her eyes to find nothing but her familiar apartment and the gnawing void that remained.
-
On the subway, she searched for signs of psychic torment. Shadowy figures, stange flashes of light. She found nothing.
-
At work, she decided she had invented it all in search of meaning. She didn’t have the dream again.
