Rachel Racette

Violet and Gold

There’s a woman watching me in my dreams. She’s been showing up for over a week now. I don’t know her. Yet, strangely, I don’t fear her presence. She’s just there, silently watching from a distance.          

            Her face is hidden beneath a shadowed hood, attached to a navy capelet. Long violet gloves sheathe her arms, toned legs donned in dark leggings and boots. Sharp lines and smooth edges, a visual contradiction. She exposes nothing to me, not a sliver of skin, yet I know to call my invader her. When I consider her as anything other, I feel a twinge of wrongness.

            Horrifying nightmare or joyous dream, she does not move. She makes no sound. It seems as if my inner thoughts matter little to nothing to her. She’s not part of my dream. I know that much. Yet she’s the only thing that remains consistent no matter how strange or disturbing my thoughts turn. Unchanged from scenario to scenario.

If I run close to her, the moment I step within three feet, I see a flash of white. I wake, gasping, heart pounding, eyes burning. A wide, manic grin filled with pearly sharp teeth burned into my brain. The image leaves me shivering well into the daylight hours, jumping at shadows and dreading future sleep.

            One week turns into two and without fail, she’s there. The moment I see her, it’s like I’m sitting between a predator’s jaws, waiting for the teeth to snap shut. Is she an omen? A ghost? An otherworldly messenger, delivering something I don’t yet understand?

            I’ve gone to all the specialists. All the blank rooms and labs have blurred together in mass memory. I have no answer. They tell me there’s nothing wrong. No tumor, no irregularity. They offer medication that does nothing but make my world hazy until she wakes me again. They all look at me like I’m crazy, offer suggestions to the best psychiatrists they know. I slam the doors as I leave.

            I make appointments and go to every session. I burn through four recommendations before giving up. They don’t understand. I don’t think anyone can. On the drive back from the last session, I scream at the empty highway until my throat burns raw.

That night, I cry and beg for her to say or do something. Anything at all. I know she knows her silent vigil haunts me. Yet she remains unbothered, like it means nothing. Like I mean nothing. I want to hurt her. Kill her. I rush towards her—a flash of a smile cuts me off. I wake up. I dry sob. I’ve run out of tears.

I buy a gun. I sit in my bathtub, shivering, wrapped in too many towels. The chill of the metal against my temple is almost soothing. My hand is steadier than I ever remember it being. I don’t pull the trigger. It lives fully loaded in the top drawer of my side table. I don’t tell anyone.

Weeks pass. I am a spiral of darkening thoughts in a cracking porcelain brain. I don’t let the darkness in. I leave every light on. I buy candles and flashlights and so many batteries. I blink as little as possible. My eyes itch and burn, but it’s worth it. I stay up as long as I can, but the human body is weak, demanding. I pass out, and every time I wake, I take out the gun and just hold it. Concentrate on the feeling of it in my hands. It feels more tempting by the day. I wonder if it would kill her, too.

I try ignoring her, but I can’t stand not being able to see where she is. I feel her burning, unseen eyes on me. The tidal wave of anxiety spills into my waking life, until my friends and family are almost as afraid as me. They tell me I look tired all the time now. They ask about the lights. About the dent in the wall that I haven’t patched yet. I don’t know what to tell them. They don’t know what the doctors’ appointments were for. They don’t know about the therapists. I don’t want to tell them. I wonder if she can see what she’s done. I wonder if she’s enjoying my suffering.

What am I supposed to do with someone who exists only in my dreams? How am I meant to combat something in a world governed by every stray thought? Maybe she smiles because she knows I’m helpless. A baby bird struggling against a harsh storm, unable to do anything but push on. Accepting the piercing rain and relentless wind battering me around.

I’m trying something new tonight. I can’t handle one more night of jolting awake with that terrible, predatory smile burning behind my eyelids. I just want to know why. Why me? Why do I have to suffer? An answer is all I want now. Don’t I deserve that, after how much she’s ruined my life?

My dream-sun is fever-bright. A blurred, messy web of so many birthday parties held in my hometown’s park when I was young. She’s standing underneath a mesh of trees, under a cloud of shadow darker than what should be possible.

I don’t question why I have so much more control tonight. I walk until I am three and a half feet away, and I just stare at that hidden face. There’s no sudden voice, no movement or flash of teeth. I sit down, cross-legged, and wait. We watch each other together for what seems like hours, waiting for the other to break.

A bead of sweat rolls down the back of my neck. Too much like a phantom fingertip. I shudder but refuse to look away. The blurry park echoes with birdsong and the distant laughter of children. Time crawls like poured molasses. I wonder, dimly, if it’s possible to fall asleep within a dream, and what would happen if one did.

Before, I felt like crying or screaming, but watching my strange sentinel now? I wonder what I had been hoping for. She’s never going to act, and even if she does, what could I possibly do against whatever she is? I feel stupid. So very stupid, and small, and so very tired. I don’t care if she stays or goes. Does that make me crazy?

“Not crazy, no.”

A voice, so soft and sweet, jerks me from my doze. I whip my head up just in time to see my watcher settle on her knees, gloved hands clasped in her lap.

“But then again, does it really matter?” She asks, head tilting to the side, pearly whites sticking out from shadow. “What importance does sanity really have?”

“What do you want?” My voice is so quiet it’s practically a rasp. My clothes feel damp and sticky. When did it get so hot? Those sunny days of my youth had never been so warm.

“Always with the interesting questions.” She sighs, sounding bored, her tone bittersweet with disappointment. It stings like a reprimand from my parents. Only people you love and trust are allowed to harm that way. Who is she to cut so deep?

“It’s always, ‘What do you want?’ or ‘What are you?’” She scoffs, teeth disappearing beneath darkness once again. “Why don’t you humans ever ask anything interesting?”

I open my mouth, the question of what she’d find interesting on my tongue, before she cuts me off with a sharp click of her tongue.

“Though, I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’re all so very alike, you know? At your core, I mean. You dig deep enough and you all look the same. Centers of primal desire and fear.”

She sighs, straightens. Her hood doesn’t move, the shadows don’t lighten, yet I can finally see her eyes. Heterochromatic; one a shimmering, piercing golden yellow, the other a penetrating, predatory violet. Looking into those eyes I see, and oh, how terrible it is. To know and not understand. How could anyone have eyes like that? What is she?

“How do you live like that?” She cocks her head again. “So unbalanced, teetering back and forth on what you want and what you’ll do to get it. Tangled in morality taught or stolen from mouths of sharp teeth or soft lips.”

Words clamor at the door to my brain, but her gaze keeps them locked inside. I want to speak, to scream, but I can’t. Why couldn’t I have just ignored her? What had I done to deserve this? The dark is inside me now, inescapable, a delicate, clawed hand squeezing my throat, filling my lungs with thick, inky fluid. Is this what drowning feels like?

I don’t want to be here! Get away from me! Please, leave me alone. Let me go. I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done. Please, please, please—

A wide mouth full of glistening fangs. Why does she have so many teeth? I am suddenly very aware, deep down into my squishy core, that she’s already seen me. Judged me. My only hope is that she finds me entertaining enough to release me. Lets me wake up and find my heart still beating.

“Honestly, it’s a good thing you didn’t try to approach me during a nightmare.” She giggles, pressing a gloved hand to her cheek. “I would have either torn you apart or showed you true fear. But alas, a broken mind isn’t much fun to watch.”

I shudder. Perhaps insanity would have been better.

She stands, and in the blink of an eye, she’s a breath away. A chill wafts from her, frigid against the heat, enveloping me. I can’t move. Was I ever in control of this dream? Of any of them?

“It’s been fun.” Her whisper is sickly sweet, breath warm and smelling of wildflowers.

She called humans conundrums? She is opposites sewn together. But then, maybe humans weren’t meant to understand whatever this wicked creature is. Maybe it was better that we couldn’t. I wish I could scrub out the little peek she’d shown me. I wish I could unknow that I had entertained her, but part of me aches to know how that will influence my fate.

“Maybe you’re better off forgetting those questions,” she mutters, her gloved hands against my cheeks. Soft and gentle, her touch could have been comforting, if only I hadn’t seen those eyes. “Or don’t. Not that it matters to me what you chose.” Another wide grin. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be fun after all.”

I wake up, drenched in sweat. Heaving for breath, and a second later, heaving for another reason. Moments later, I lay against the chilly tile of my bathroom floor, the ghost of her hands on my skin. That grin flashes behind my eyelids. I dread what real fun is to a being like her.

I wonder how long a human can go without sleep.

Rachel Racette born in 1999, in Balcarres, Saskatchewan. Interested in creating her own world and characters and loves writing science-fiction and fantasy. She has always loved books of fantasy and science fiction as well as comics. Lives with her supportive family and cat, Cheshire. Published in the anthology The Spelunkers: A Chipper Press Anthology and Arthropod Literary Journal Issue 1.