The Blue Sparkler

Excerpt from The Comb (A Novel, Coming 2014)

Anne-Marie Fowler

Published in

Fiction Excerpts

26 min readDec 19, 2013

Felice asked me if I loved Zane.

She asked me if I loved Jackson too. Then she asked me if I loved Arthur.

And we ended up in a giggling sort of “Fuck, Marry, Kill” game, though that was far too simplistic in the case of those three, I insisted.

“There are no simple men in my life. They are all really complicated.”

“Whatever, Lucie. Answer my question.”

And we were back Felice’s question.

“Do you love Zane?”

I answered no. Quite immediately and definitely.

And I waited for “the fish.”

The fish is an expression, among those of us who come from cultures of alcoholism and its emotionally deprived realities.

We know how to survive We keep it together. Almost always.

But then there are the fish.

The fish come in different forms. They surprise us.

A “fish” is a nanosecond of feeling. Not typically identifiable. But you know it’s happened. It displays physically. A pang in the diaphragm, a leap of a heartbeat, a twinge in the sinus. A moment when you don’t quite have enough air.

Then nothing at all.

The little fish that leap up out of the water. Momentarily without breath. But dancing anyway. As they achieve unexpected height.

I waited. Just after I said no.

There was no fish. No twinge. No wiggle.

Which meant I was telling myself the truth.

This was reassuring.

It could also have mentioned that I had answered “kill Zane” or “fuck Zane” to the question.

“Marry Zane” was pretty much out of the question as Zane was married already.

Felice, being Felice, had to ask me an obnoxious question.

“So what would you do if he left his wife?”

She was plumping a little couch pillow, and she threw it at me.

I caught it.

“He never will,” I replied.

No fish again. I win.

She shook her head. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do.”

I didn’t actually know, but I never had considered it any other way.

It was something I could not imagine.

Ever. It was not that it was a repulsive thought or a bad one. It was just that it was impossible.

As in I’d decided that the very laws of physics itself would not ever allow it.

It was not ever to be thought of.

And that is how I lived.

Zane’s hand clasped mine. I woke up and he was still here, and covering most of me, and as I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was his left hand over the top of mine.

I looked at our interlocked hands, for a moment feeling separate from them. Somehow I needed to feel separate from them, to be able to see them from all sides.

They looked so natural. Not triumphant, nor desperate, neither loose nor tight.

They just were.

I listened to his breathing. Its rhythm and its peace.

He felt safe sleeping next to me.

The power of this made me stop thinking for a moment. I had no words for it. It seemed to draw my racing mind to a halt.

Looking just beyond our hands, I saw our two identical pagers on the night table. And one wedding band, and the little wooden Virgin Mary from my Gramma. All quiet. Not moving.

Sometimes one of the pagers moved, though typically it would be both at once, the originator of the press or distress call not realizing that these two particular pagers were lying next to each other. Creating their own little private earthquake, their disruption of a moment. A vision of what would come next.

But not now. Now was peaceful. And I breathed slowly, along with him, and fell asleep again.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a beautiful palace.

I heard, from another room, a violin. In the quietest vibrato.

I heard it again.

Then more distantly, a horn. A French horn, and then a cello, then a flute, then a harp. I couldn’t yet see it. But I could hear it and feel it. It was an orchestra tuning itself. Readying itself for something.

There was to be an occasion. Music was going to be part of it.

Then I saw a door.

I went through the door, and the hall I entered was magnificent, with a ceiling painted with angels and grapes, vines and flowers. The room was at least thirty feet high, and each door went into other rooms, each with its own favorite color, in deep hues of green, blue, crimson, and then cream and gold. The last room was lit by chandeliers of real flame, and the ceiling sparkled in the light. A room to the side was painted as if it was a garden, and its mirrors made it look like it wet on forever into secret passageways that I’d never ever be able to fully explore.

I continued to look for the music, encountering marble stairways and hearing the distant voices of people. I was not alone. Returning to the cream and gold room, I saw it had now expanded to full ballroom size, and the music, now orchestral and being formally conducted, was filling it.

People were filling it as well. They were dressed for a beautiful party, in styles Renaissance to Baroque, Rococo to Romantic. I did not recognize any of them, but they all seemed to recognize me.

They were greeting me as if I was the center of attention, but without the usual fakery and annoyance which accompany such parties in the Capital. At such parties, everyone flatters you and tells you you’re important.

And you are, because you are to be the main dish. What they all will eat for dinner.

They fatten you with compliments so that you will be juicy to consume.

But this did not feel like that.

There were windows in the room now, arched and regal and they revealed a grand parterre outside of the palace.

The grounds went on for a half mile or so before rising up a hill to a majestic fountain.

“There are thirty fountains on the property,” I heard a woman say to another.

The fountains raged from ornate to pastoral, from folly to functional, featuring barely clothed gods and goddesses, and those existing in between the divine and the physical, between bastard and gifted, the blessed and the lucky. Each wrapped in myth and the confusion of not knowing whether heaven or earth home.

Wanting to find out where I was before greeting the guests, I chose to peer through the tallest set of doors, one which assumed me into a grand hall filled with mirrors.

The room was silver and white, and I caught a glimpse of a figure in a mirror towards the end of the room. Running toward it, in fear and curiosity, I saw what I think was myself.

I wasn’t wearing shoes. Just little cloth slippers, which clung to my feet and made no noise at all.

I was in a cream and gold dress, and my hair was longer than in real life, almost to my waist. It was held off my face by a small olive colored band which evoked a Renaissance painting.

But I did not feel like I was in costume. Still, I looked like I was in another era, and I looked almost like a bride.

I stepped back for a moment.

I was trying to understand whether this was my reflection, or a mirage.

I had set out to find the source of the music, and amidst my breathless and sense-filled journey I had forgotten my sense of direction.

Where was I in the palace, and how far did the gardens last?

Why was I here?

There had to be a reason.

I went back to the room with the chandeliers, and there we long tables of beautiful food. Everything was decorated and there were so many sweets.

I looked and wondered if the food tasted as good as it looked. The little cakes were so detailed, some appeared to have architectural prints, all edible, atop them as decoration. Even the flowers and berries, crafted of sugar and icing, were almost too glittering and intricate and flawless to be real.

Little chocolate squares each bore a seal of gold; no seal was the same as the next one. I saw a woman eat three of them, gold and all. She did not ever want to step away. Or perhaps she did not know how.

In the center of the room was a cream colored chaise lounge, and a young girl took my hand and led me toward it. It was where I would receive guests, she said.

As she took my right hand, I saw that I was wearing a large amethyst ring. I recognized it. It was real. It had been my grandmother’s and she had given it to me for special occasions.

I relaxed onto the chaise, with lilies next to me on a small glass table, arranged into a tight monochromatic bouquet, combining cream and proximate shades of palest peach and pink. I relaxed and closed my eyes.

I could feel the music this way. It was in waltz time, and my mind and hands moved up and down to mark each three step sequence. I thought of the polkas I danced as a child, and the shapes my feet would trace on the floor as I danced.

My hands were clasped for a quiet moment on my stomach. I felt someone softly take both of them.

I opened my eyes.

Zane was kneeling next to the chaise. He was holding my hands. And looking at me. He saw my eyes open, and his face held a sort of joy.

It was quick but I saw it.

I had trained my eye to capture Zane’s very brief moments of humanlike expression.

But I had never seen his face like that before.

He looked perfect.

We were going to dance.

I stood up. Everyone in the room was watching. But I was not nervous.

I entered his arms, as if by my own choice. We began to dance, and people began to applaud.

But it did not feel like dancing feels.

I could not feel the floor. I had no bearing or sense of direction, but I was floating in a way that made direction of no consequence.

How was I dancing, if I could not feel the floor?

Zane was carrying me.

It was a feeling I was not accustomed to.

When I took ballet at much younger age, I was taught how to be aware of myself on stage. Always watching myself as if I was not in my own body. This was especially true when partnering, even though I never did this at too advanced a level.

To be candid, I was not a good partner.

I would not let my male counterpart take my weight. I always expected that he would drop me, so I was ever prepared for that same outcome.

Not for the dance itself.

This refusal of presence in an artist, a dance in performance, is obvious to a trained eye, and often to an untrained one as well.

When a dancer refuses to be carried, it’s about more than fear. It’s a lack of trust.

I’d been dropped before, and even thrown into a dumpster once. In Potrero Hill, after a party. A guy had been screaming at his pregnant girlfriend to have an abortion and just get it over with.

I’d reminded him that women had a choice. And he tossed me into a dumpster. This whole exchange took very little time, though it reminded me of the disadvantage that comes with small stature. I’d learned this as a child. The smaller you are, the easier it is for a man to hurl you across a room. Or into the garbage.

But mostly it was because I was just not accustomed to being carried. I was not carried much as a child, except when I was being removed from the pathway of someone’s drinking or a related danger. It was always associated with peril or abandonment of some sort.

It did not enter my mind to be carried, to even know it was possible, let alone know what it felt like.

What took my breath away was being swooped upward, and having it feel natural, and not at all scary.

I heard the music rise, but rather than a huge dramatic crescendo it was a magical sort of lifting, and I was off the floor and had no fear of falling.

We were dancing together.

It was not like being partnered on stage, where I always worried that I’d have to make up for the messier motives of a partnership forced by ratio or relative size.

Instead, it was as if we were dancing the same dance.

The music ended and I spun into a crowd of people. They congratulated me, but not in a cloying or condescending way like one so often sees at weddings.

It was not as if I was the beautified and lucky beneficiary of someone else’s dream and work and fortune. Or as if I was part of a claustrophobic sort of joke, the kind one knows from television dramas about women overwhelmed or tearful, or on the verge of giving up.

I always cringe during such stories of exaggerated bravery, stories that pretend to be praising a woman’s inner struggles and willingness to be vulnerable but actually stating unequivocally and for all time that the woman is weak and ridiculous. And must be rescued immediately.

Life does not happen that way.

“Rescuing is something you do for yourself,” I was always reminded.

It is not something someone else does for you.

“Rescue by another always carries a price,” my Gramma had said, “and you don’t always know what the price is until later.

Or too late.”

Rescue sounded scary.

As the dance concluded, Zane still held my hand.

Everyone was blowing bubbles. The bubbles surrounded us and photographs were taken. The sparkle of the room was picked up by each bubble, and in the light the bubbles looked like a cascade of snowflakes, unbound by gravity or any need to go any certain predetermined way.

I had not spoken, for several minutes. Now I did.

“I think I could stay here,” I said.

I gasped, shocked at my own statement, and felt something, a wave of muscle relaxation rising from my core to my throat, which may well have been joy.

I wondered if that is what it was. If this is what joy felt like.

I had never wanted to stay anywhere. I had always thought of where I would be next.

There was never a place I felt at peace, a place I just wanted to be.

I was always escaping.

There was always a reason to escape. I was so, so good at it too.

I had to be. Yet here I was, in a place that seemed far across the world, and I did not want to go back to any place I was supposed to have considered home.

But I never really had seen anyplace as “home” before.

Every time I’d felt myself starting to call somewhere home, I had moved ahead. I’d put it behind me, and tell myself that it was the right thing to do.

I’d had so many dreams where I was searching for lost luggage. I’d told this to Zane once. He said he’d had them too.

I’d be traveling, or awaiting a car or taxi or train, and I’d be amidst some obsession about baggage left behind or still to be found. Baggage that had opened and spilled in transit.

I was never quite sure what it was that had spilled. What I had lost, and whether it had mattered.

I would be racking my brain to recall, and I would wake from each dream as I did so.

What is it that I am trying to get back? What have I lost?

But moving though this scene, with its smiles and its embraces, there was no such struggle.

Whatever had been left behind was not needed.

Whatever was with me was precisely where it belonged.

The whole scene seemed to exist on a bed of starlight. It was illumined like neither night nor day. And I wondered for a moment if this place was Earth, or made of only sky.

I looked around, and Zane was in the crowd. He was receiving attention just like I was. I tried to follow him, reaching at least to grab his sleeve, yet I kept getting stopped by others. Who wanted to embrace me and congratulate me.

Had I just been married? I didn’t remember that part.

All I remembered was the dance.

A young girl brought me a plate of purplish red grapes, and told me to eat. “You have’t eaten yet!” she cried.

I thanked her and took two. But the grapes did not taste like grapes. They were frozen, in sugar, and they melted in my mouth. Juiceless and without firmness, without water. I wondered where the real food was. These grapes were a treat. Not a gift, but something given as reward. Perhaps with conditions.

A reward for someone who has fulfilled a task, given as reciprocation. Not ever given as nourishment. Pretty but unsatisfying.

A woman I had seen before, during earlier discussion of the thirty fountains, was eating an orange. It was in slices, on a plate, with a sort of glaze on them. I realized that they were gumdrops, and that she was taller than I recalled.

She walked by and looked down.

“Oh, how petite you are!” She said. She spoke the word “petite” in a French accent. Perfectly Parisian, in inflection and attitude.

I wanted to dance again. I looked over at Zane.

I saw him talking with two other men. They were praising him, and using hand gestures, and leading him into the anteroom, the one with the mirrors and the murals of gardens.

I decided to follow him.

I made my way through the room. The smell of orange and sugar from the gumdrops was still in my nose, and affected everything else. So did the leftover sugar from the grapes. I was a bit dizzy but chose to ignore it.

I stood outside the door and awaited a decision of how and when I should enter. Zane was between the men and they were speaking and nodding, as if they valued Zane’s opinion. I could not quite make out what they were saying.

As I grew closer, there were more men in the room. But they looked the same.

The vines and the men had multiplied across the mirrors, and I was unsure which Zane was Zane and which one was not. In the mirror room where it all went on forever and I could not tell which one was him, and which one was his reflection, or a reflection of his reflection, all of them looking alike in the light, and at the distance at which I stood.

Then a little boy ran by with a sparkler. It was blue and lit, making a cracking sound. It distracted me. I looked into the blue fire, then remembered the room again.

I looked back into the room.

All of the figures, into mirrored infinity, were Zane.

The little boy laughed. I couldn’t tell if Zane heard him, but he looked about, turning as he sat down on the floor.

I Zane was in the center of the room but I could not tell, and his hands felt the floor. He placed both palms face down, as if to steady himself.

The floor was not smooth as it was where we’d danced. There were raised bumps I had not seen before, as if a rubber matting had waterproofed the floor from spilt wine or milk. He held a writing tablet of some sort in his hands, and I knew it was from the two men.

A wedding gift, or other instructions?

He looked up at me, and his eyes were wistful, and then distant, and then fierce, and then he looked down. Had he seen me at all?

Right then, I was lifted up from behind, by two men, as a woman in cerise ran past and cried,

“Come now, you must see!”

Zane was still deciding something, and I was being lifted away.

I did not want to go see anything.

Would he let me help him decide? Did he know I was watching him?

But I was lifted and turned towards the ballroom, which was filling with a sort of incense. It rose to the ceiling of the cream and gold room, giving it a bluish cast as if it was a sunny sky above.

Something was hanging from the ceiling. It was a trapeze.

“Zane?” I looked back, and just saw one of him though the doorway. He was looking at the tablet. Was he reading?

I was whisked away and I couldn’t tell. I felt as if I had to know.

The crowd’s attention was grasped by the trapeze, which was now swinging from the blue haze above, the ceiling not quite being visible. I had not seen the trapeze earlier, but it flew down from the ceiling to capture a girl on stilts.

It was all very smooth and beautifully coordinated; clearly it was a rehearsed performance.

The trapeze girl was very slender with long shiny straight black hair, and throughout the party she had been walking on stilts encrusted with rubies and sapphires. They were not so much acrobatic stilts as decorative stilts which were part of her ensemble, which sparkled with a glamour of the young and aspiring. The trapeze lifted her to much oohing by the crowd, who cheered her every swing, and jumped a bit each time she almost hit the ceiling, and each time the crowd had to part so that her long legs would just miss them.

The stilts eventually fell to the floor, providing a placemark for those who moved in and out of her pendulum pathway.

Another young woman picked up one of the stilts, and she was joined by another. I was at first concerned that they would walk away with them, knowing how expensive they must be.

But instead they used them as tools, dipping them into a large bowl of what looked like a fruit punch or soup. A chilled treat being served in little single gulp cups, which turned out to be edible once the nectar inside was consumed.

The stilts were dipped into the nectar, and the swinging girl would lick them as they passed, to the delight of the crowd, a red concoction now circling her mouth and in some moments dropping to the floor. This caused some flurry for those wishing to spare their gowns from any sort of stain.

Then the stilts began to strike her.

As if she were a birthday pinata. The girl originally played along with the game, skillfully avoiding the hits by slightly twisting her body in the trapeze.

But eventually the stilts swingers figured her out, and she could no longer surprise with her artful moves.

The first hit went to the legs and the trapeze girl tried to stifle a cry.

I gasped,

“What is going on?”

“Oh, dearie, it is not real,” said a woman nearby, laughing at my ridiculous question.

The hits grew more creative, with the stilts being passed up to stronger men, some of whom twirled as an athlete twirls about to achieve momentum before flinging a discus.

A sharp hit to the jaw sent blood spilling from the girl’s mouth, now mixing with the fruit concoction that had stickily been there before, now the salt and metal taste of her own blood overcame the fruit’s sweetness.

A child screamed and ran. A woman who seemed to be her guardian seemed embarrassed and tried to catch her.

“Theah, you are not behaving!” She cried.

“You are off, off, off kilter!”

I followed the little girl. She ran outside. I seemed to recall that there had been a children’s play area outside, surrounded by younger orange trees. Maybe she would be safe there. Or maybe she would not. I recall these children’s areas from garden parties my Gramma took me to back in California.

Typically I hated them. At best, the children were boring and had nothing to talk about. Their play with dolls never involved any adventures or trips to outer space. The girls would laugh at how little I knew about fashion or cosmetics. I had never considered such topics around dolls.

My dolls wore gingham, but they did not wear lipstick.

Typically and at worst, I would be bullied and would return to the adults injured in some way. One time, I had a black eye and it rose immediately in an ugly swelling which made people not want to look at me.

The game was volleyball, and when I tried to serve from the back line, the ball had gone into the net.

It was supposed to go over the net. But I was too small and did not have the power to punch the ball as hard as the others could.

That day I learned something. If you can’t serve a volleyball, people punch you until your eye and your nose and your cheek all swell up. I remembered it always and avoided volleyball from then on.

And I avoided children’s play areas. Adults were far more interesting, if you could get one to take you seriously. Or find a much, much older one that everyone was ignoring, but who had wonderful stories to tell.

One who had been a real pioneer. Or who had fought in a real war.

The little girl, Theah, looked back at me for just a moment, and I could tell that she wanted me to follow her.

She ran down the stairs toward the grand parterre.

And so did I. And suddenly I could not see her anymore. Was she hiding, or had she just run too fast, disappearing over the lip of the staircase and leaving my sight for just long enough?

Or had she actually disappeared?

I could hear the cheers of the party. At one point I heard a crash, and wondered if the trapeze girl had fallen.

Or been thrown down.

I wondered if she had been real. I wondered if she was now dead.

I ran back up to the French doors from which I had exited, but they had no knob on the outside.

They were locked, and I could not get back in. I raised my hand to knock, then had a feeling that I should not touch the door at all. A heat seemed to rise from it.

I ran the other way, out to the grand parterre.

I kept running. On my right there was a labyrinth.

I ran into it, and stopped to catch my breath.

Should I hide here until someone found me?

I decided against this, it being an enclosed space, and left the labyrinth. It took me three tries, and at last I climbed up a hedge to see which way it would be safer to go once I was back out in the open.

And as I climbed, I ripped the hem of my dress.

I ran past a fountain of Neptune, and another of a goddess whose name I did not know. And having no direction, I decided to ascend a hill before me.

I needed to climb, so that I might see where I was.

But my dress was unraveling. Even more so, it was dropping off parts of itself, and behind me was a trail of cloth pieces, cream and gold, across an expanse of lawn, and I was left wearing little.

But I was covered. I was in a plain cream shift, and I still wore my Gramma’s ring, and I still had my olive headband.

I felt naked. But I was not.

I remained in motion, noting that I could move far more easily in my now lighter clothing. I was far from the palace now, but could see it in the distance. The afternoon light was taking on shades of pink and violet, and over the hill I saw the ruins.

They were part of the palace grounds, but looked nothing like the palace.

They were collapsing.

A pool in front of them hosted a god and goddess of the river, who gazed up at the ruins as if to welcome, encourage or even command their disintegration into the water. The fountain was there to reflect the old stones in each moment’s new light, to reflect as the whole structure crumbled, slowly and proudly.

Even in breaking, it held a sort of quiet and regal dignity. One which the palace did not possess.

I looked back at the palace. It looked blurry, but it was not due to distance. There was a sort of wiggly heat, the kind that seems to rise from the ground in the hottest summer days in the Central Valley.

Then I saw smoke.

There was smoke coming from the top of the palace. I had not recalled a fireplace, or a chimney, though clearly there had to have been one somewhere.

Was the palace on fire?

The smoke looked white, but on closer observation, in a moment where the wiggly heat parted and one could see past its added distortion, it was blue.

Like the little boy’s blue sparkler? Or the incense that the trapeze had emerged from?

And where had the little girl run to? Where was Theah? I could not see her anywhere.

I decided to walk right up towards the ruin.

I could not tell how far away it was, and arrived far sooner than I expected.

What I had not expected were people.

From the distance I had looked from just moments ago, they had been invisible.

Dressed simply in a way that did not indicate exposure or sensitivity to extreme heat or cold, thirty or so were gathered just up the hill from the ruin, framed by its archway as if in a painting.

They gazed up still further at what looked like a statue.

They surrounded what appeared to be a working, though ancient, sundial.

I say working sundial because it wasn’t quite like the sort you buy in garden emporiums as a visual folly or decoration.

It was an actual clock. It told time and season, by the angle and distance of the sun.

Though it had one addition. A pair of sunglasses. Whimsically placed just to the side. No one seemed to be claiming them as their own.

They seemed to belong to the sundial, if such a thing was possible.

Gazing up the hill at the statue, the people did not notice me.

Then the statue did.

It was not a statue, but a young woman, in white, wearing the same slippers I had been wearing, and standing in fifth position, framed by trees on each side and behind her.

I realized I was barefoot. My slippers had gone.

The statues head turned slowly leftwards, and was not looking at me now.

Those surrounding her now did. They turned.

I spread my arms in greeting, then raised my hands above my head. My Gramma’s amethyst ring on one hand and the olive green band, no longer in my hair, in the other.

I’m unsure why I spread my arms. It was not in joy or welcome, but in fear that they needed me to say something.

I did not know what to say, but knew that I must speak. What I said sounded like a mumble, as if I was speaking in a different language.

A woman on the side of the group cried out to me, as if in supplication, not accusation, but with a power all her own.

I understood her.

“Where is my daughter?” she asked.

Had the little girl been her daughter, I wondered? The girl Theah, the little girl triple off kilter?

Off kilter was not an expression I heard in the Minister’s office too often.

Another woman came from behind her, accompanied by two men, one at each side.

She began to tell me something, but I could not understand. It was another language, one I did not recognize.

I stooped to the ground and traced with my fingers, “Lucie,” and tried to capture the sounds as I heard them. I wanted her to know that I was trying to understand her.

I wondered if the woman with the daughter was an interpreter, and I looked for her.

But she had gone. Had she gone towards the palace? Were they looking for me?

These new thoughts interfering with my grasp of the sounds of the woman’s language, I looked up from the ground, and stood again.

The girl in white, the statue-like girl framed by trees above the ruin, the one that it seemed they had all come to meet by the sundial, was gone.

What time was it? It was evening, and I could no longer see the sundial’s hour.

I wanted to know what happened to the palace, but I had forgotten which direction the palace was in.

I climbed a nearby tree, getting help up to the first branch by two of the men, whom I noted did not speak at all.

I looked out into the evening, and could not see the palace. But saw in the far distance, a Ferris wheel turn its lights on. For nighttime.

I looked down, and it was if the tree had become much, much taller. I felt dizzy and thought I might fall. I reached out to hold on.

My eyes opened and the first thing I felt was my hand. It felt cold.

Zane’s hand was not on it.

And I was alone.

I looked around.

I touched the bed next to me. It still held a trace of warmth, as if someone had been there not long ago.

“Zane?”

There was one pager on the table.

One handcarved wooden Virgin Mary.

There was no wedding band next to her.

Maybe Zane was peeing. I tried to listen, to hear if he was. But heard nothing.

Maybe he had to leave, maybe it was about Leah, but he hadn’t woken me, and I hadn’t heard the pager.

Maybe he had dreamt something different than I did, and maybe it was frightening.

Maybe we had dreamt the same.

I breathed in reassurance that he’d just had to go home, which was normal, and then I saw a piece of paper on the floor, which was not.

It was folded three ways and looked deliberately placed.

I was afraid to open it. I felt tingling on my skin. I felt a presence of something, and it was not me. The paper made a sort of crackling sound as I opened it.

You

Crave

Me

It was written in pencil.

The moments of blur and cold were followed by a wave of nausea that was powerful. Not so much for its force as its feeling of permanence.

It made me wonder if I would eat again.

I was afraid to look out of the window.

I was afraid that if I walked out of my house I’d find that everything had changed, as if I had fallen accidentally into a hidden ground cave and awoken in another time and reality.

There was something I needed to be ready for.

But I did not know what it was.

It was on the tip of my mind, but I could not quite get up to the thought. To where it lived.

What did the note mean?

Zane had gone somewhere, and he had left without letting me wash him first.

Had he gone home, smelling of me?

I remembered Zane in my dream, a prince at what may have been his wedding, sitting on the floor, in the anteroom, with the murals of gardens, and all the mirrors.

I could not tell which one had been him.

It was almost seven a.m., and I had to stop thinking this way.

I knew Zane would be at work.

I knew Zane would probably say good morning.

And I knew Zane might even act normally.

Zane the brilliant protégé, my co worker was still going to be there.

Zane, my midnight visitor who clasped my hand and played in my dreams with me might even still be there too.

But a part of Zane was gone. The Risk Board was folded up and my notebooks were back on my shelf. Neatly. Orderly. Unloved.

I was alone.

But there was the note.

Nothing was normal anymore.

I was numb. In an indescribably quiet way. I couldn’t bear to look at the clock.

I couldn’t grasp anything, not even a word, to anchor myself and assess what was happening.

I had no explanation, and maybe I would never have one at all.

A next phase had begun. That is all I knew.

“Something’s different,” I said aloud, as I slowly walked into the kitchen, my shoulder banging in to the door jamb. I didn’t feel a thing.

“How do you know?” asked Tammy, wondering where the comment had come from, but not surprised, as I said random untethered sorts of things rather often lately.

“From the dream,” I said.

“What dream?”

“I was in Vienna. Right near to Vienna.”

“How do you know?”

“From the Ferris Wheel. I saw the Riesenrad. At night.”

She offered me some tea, and said nothing.

On my way to work I went back through the dream. Its detail and its questions. I remembered that I had not ever reentered the palace. Not after I was locked out, and not after seeing the bluish smoke.

Had I missed an opportunity to reenter, to discover what was going on?

Or would I have been in danger if I had gone back? Perhaps I was safer outside, even amidst strangers, even amidst having lost most of what I had, including the beautiful dress I was wearing, in my escape from the palace.

In the distance, the Riesenrad rose. And as the dream dimmed and the big wheel lit up, it had also trembled and begun to rotate. At first slowly.

Then faster than I had expected.

Clockwise.