This is the way the world ends, Sarah thought to herself. First there's pain, and then darkness, and all we have left are our memories. She was floating. She was nothing. She was emotion and the emotion was raw and bit at the back of her throat. She knew this place, it had a name. "Fear." The word echoed from a far away place, across distances uncharted; seas that had never been sailed by human ships. Slowly, she took shape. Shapes. The shape of a hand at first, holding a key. The key slid into a door and the little pins clicked into place. There was a door, and a key, and a hand, and now there was Sarah. She looked down at her feet, and her memories built ancient wooden floors under her shoes, plank by plank. They clicked into place under her, driving back into the hallway behind her, like puzzle pieces being laid by unseen hands.
The hands of my memory.
Yes, that was it.
But there were hands. And a door. And a key.
She turned and faced the door again. She knew this place. She tried to turn the key, but there was no place for the key to go.
"You can't unlock an open door," the distant voice said again. It wasn't Sarah's voice, but it felt as though it had always been there, in her or near her.
"It's already open," Sarah whispered to herself. The voice didn't have to tell her to close her eyes and breathe deeply; it was an instinct, like putting your hands out when you fall. The breath that came in told her stories of the people on the other side of the door. People filled with fear, confusion, anger.
"Danger," the distant voice whispered. "Danger, Sarah." But the little voice from across wide seas was hard to hear. It was drowned out by Sarah's inner voice, which howled and roared with rage like the wind in a storm. There had been lies. Her mother had seemed to understand, had seemed to support her. But what was behind this door was the truth of the situation.
"This is all a memory," Sarah said aloud, trying to shake the mantle of sluggishness that always wraps itself around dreams and half-forgotten thoughts. The words echoed through the hall around her, skittering off of walls, and bouncing off into the unfinished nothingness where the wood planks ended abruptly several feet behind her. Sarah gritted her teeth and turned to the door. It opened, pushed by a hand she remembered had reached out from her side. She walked into the hallway that led to the apartment's living room. There was a door to her right, but no doorknob to it. This would have been her roommate's room. Cecilia, Sarah recalled, was chipper but driven. She was blond. Sarah tried to recall her face, but when it didn't materialize, she found she wasn't too bothered. The door didn't have a handle; this wasn't for her. She walked on, past the second door where Emily would have lived. No doorknob; no point in stopping. Em had had straight dark hair and dark eyes. She had been nice, but in a way that was not overly memorable. Sarah didn't bother. She walked the rest of the hall to the living room, where her parents, her Rabbi, her Rabbi's wife, and the man they wanted her to marry, all stood or sat awkwardly around the room. The voice, the distant little voice rose up again, this time closer,
"Danger, Sarah," it warned. "Dangerous."
"What are you doing here?" she heard herself say. It was like watching an old movie where you know the ending, but you watch anyway.
"We're here because we love you," said the Rabbi's wife. She was short and fat, and looked like she needed a shower.
"You're off the path," her father had said. His voice pushed at her, hammered at her will, commanding her to come home. She fought. For the first time since she had turned twenty-one and had decided to commit to her own dreams, she fought back and pushed at the intrusion. The voice spoke,
"Dangerous, Sarah."
Her father took a step back, as if slapped. Her mother's eyes shot between the two of them. The man to whom she had been promised rose and tried to walk toward her. In reality, he had come to her, grasped her arms with a pleading look in his eyes. He had begged her to return to them, to their community. That had been the real man… but this dream man reached for her arm and shattered into millions of tiny shards of light.
"Dangerous, Sarah," said the voice again. Had she killed him? She looked with panic from the brilliant pieces of dust floating to the ground, to the faces of her parents. Their eyes grew wide with fear, and they put their hands up in defense against an unseen attack, only to have the hands melt like warm butter in the face of a blazing fire. They raised their hands to their faces, screaming, trying to push their skin back onto their skulls, which blazed white from the light of day. It was so bright… Sarah looked down at her hands, and realized the light was coming from her. She lifted her hands up to see them better, and her parents screamed as they popped like burst balloons.
"Dangerous Sarah," the voice said again, and Sarah woke up screaming in the arms of a man as cold as death.