dream overdose
She pays to watch time bare itself before her, in all of its beauty and terror. No one ever notices her burden. —Cassandra, in two separate lives.
I.
Apollo hangs bright in the sky when she looks up, squinting into the light. Fingers of sunlight reach for her, caress her skin and leave it warm and flushed. The god himself curls his lip—half-smile, half contemptuous smirk—and leans against a tree. It sways as if the dryad is afraid of him. "I have an offer."
She hears it, chews on her lip, and makes her decision.
01.
She steps out of reach from the beautiful boy who flirts with her, not trusting him any further than the shadowy men that lurk in the back alleyways and leer at her as she passes out. She's not running away, though, not quite.
His voice drops to a whisper; she is almost captivated, but she does not lean closer. "I could give you anything," he tells her.
II.
The god stalks her dreams, his impatience thinly disguised. He points up at the sky and forces her to watch as the sun wavers and washes everything pink and orange. It is setting. The day is closing, and his sister will come. Artemis has no sympathy for girls like her.
Her sleep is restless and unfulfilling. She takes to sleeping during the day, when he's too busy for her, and staring out the window at night, trying to listen to the voices in the back of her head.
02.
She wears jeans and clasps a glowing cigarette between her fingers, and she is queen of the world. You cannot trick him, they warn. You will not be able to. He is more powerful than you think. He appears one day, seemingly out of nowhere, and steals a kiss from her, his lips bruising and demanding over her own. The brick wall of the alley presses against her back.
When he tries to ask for more, her eyes flash and she runs. It is exactly as the voices say — he is angry.
III.
She learns this: it is not easy to defy a god. You do not know as much as a deity, and you never will.
When the voices grow louder, she closes her eyes and tries to shut them out. It is not as glorious as she thought it would be, to be able to tell the future. Where the voices disappear, the sights begin. Blood and bodies ravage the place where she grew up, and where she is still growing. She does not see any more.
03.
The people she knows grow to find conflict. She wakes up one night to see a fire burning out her window and almost screams, thinking it is him, come to take her blood if he cannot have her heart. The city she lives in is a mess, thriving on violence and guns and sex, and it has a fondness for tearing itself apart.
She sees bodies scattered across the floor of every room she steps in. They're not real. Of course they're not real.
Out of the corner of her eye, the sunlight dances and slashes through the shadows, but when she turns, the darkness has formed once again. I warned you, he is saying to her.
IV.
Everyone thinks she is going mad. She wanders the streets of Troy, sometimes babbling incoherently, clutching a shawl to her bony shoulders. She is no longer beautiful. The mad prophetess, they say, jeering at her as she tells them to run, to hide, to be safe.
Apollo comes once at night and stands over her bed, his eyes dead in only the way a deity's could ever be. He does not touch her. He calls her darling liar, poor sweet girl, and he walks out the door. He does not look back.
She curls up in her bed and never says a word to him. Pride is a foolish thing, and she will keep it to her dying day. He has plenty of it as well; he would know.
04.
The people surrounding her grow concerned. She's taken to a doctor and diagnosed with auditory and visual hallucinations. There's a prescription written down in almost illegible handwriting—a common trait in doctors, maybe from all the times their hands shake as they pronounce the death sentence—and she starts taking medicine that tastes like blood in the back of her throat, metallic and unpleasant.
She expects to get better. Surely the beautiful boy can't fight against the laws of science. (What he has done to her is not scientific.)
She does not get better. She wakes up at night screaming and sobbing, and when the day comes that every body she sees in her dreams drops to the ground with blood pouring from their skin in reality and bullets shattering their ribcages, she cannot feel a flicker of triumph.
The voices tell her nothing. Her future is empty.
V.
War is not a pretty thing, and the Trojan War is as ugly as any other. Apollo would not have wanted to take it to bed. It plays out as she had foretold, but there is nobody for her to brag to that is not six feet underground.
When it falls at last, she refuses to fall with it. She clings to what she has, prays to the gods—to every deity she knows, even the one that has cursed her—until she is found, and gods, she wishes she wasn't. The Greeks force themselves into her (their hands are dirty and bloody as Ajax rapes her), drag her across land her feet have never touched before, and she is made into a prize.
The only voice in the back of her head is Apollo's, when Agamemnon's lips press against her neck and she tries not to flinch away. She already knows that she should not have gone back on her promise.
05.
No one trusts her anymore. She wanders the streets and pops pills that don't help her at all, her feet shuffling and collecting dirt, her eyes as dead as the people she used to know. The person who takes her in is a man twice her age who ogles her more than any decent person should; his wife looks at them both with hatred written in every line of her face.
She's only another casualty.
When she's killed, no one notices.