The Blonde looked up from her book from where she sat in bed.
The man in the blue coveralls and the old Halloween mask stood silently in the doorway to the room she'd claimed as her own in a memory of a house somewhere in the Midwest in the memory of Autumn where zero intersected with zero.
They met when she was fourteen.
He: limping home to the asylum on the side of the highway on Halloween night, leaving her fly fart of a town in a trail of blood and rattling pills. A tall man, taller than her older cousins on Gramps's side of the family, with black eyes and a strange, empty silence surrounding him, as if God, in making the world, had forgotten to pencil in the bit that surrounded him, leaving it blank.
She: feeling something was wrong, quietly abandoned the little herd of unsupervised wild girls that roamed the town every summer, tromping down the side of the new double highway that bypassed her town in search of the dim glimmer in her head which grew brighter as the dying town faded behind her.
The not-quite-a-woman found the source of the invisible light behind her eyes lying in the ditch; hair matted with blood, a torn mask beside him… a giant?
Pulling off her ratty bedsheet ghost costume, she'd hunkered down beside him among the beer cans, muck, and cattails, studying him as semis whizzed past in the hard blue twilight.
Except for one eye socket that oozed dark, he looked like her: square face, black almond eyes (eye), unruly hair, strong cheekbones… surrounded by blue and light brown eyes, she was the only person she knew who had eyes that dark. After removing a bent knitting needle from his neck she sat down beside her discovery, draping him with the sheet, which blossomed with dark roses in the rising moon, and talked to him.
Without talking.
Oblivious to time and place shifting around them- something only beings like themselves could do when in danger, he'd shakily reached for her hand and she let him take it as his remaining eye dimmed. She hated touch, and so did he, only to flee when she saw that the world caught up to them in the shape of a highway patrol vehicle pulling over nearby.
Boots muddied, pillowcase full of candy still in her hand, she escaped into a nearby field, walking five miles back to town, and rejoined her friends with nobody the wiser.
Less than a year later the man she'd found dying in the ditch visited her regularly, even after the end of it all.
The same as ever, the man stood in front of her, huge boots sinking into the pink shag carpet. She reached over and switched off the KISS 8-track that had been quietly playing and moved her cracked lips, the scarred lump in her mouth began oozing. The man offered her an ice cube from 0x0 and she took it, the cold dulling the constant pain in her mouth while he ruffled her hair in a rare gesture of physical affection.
In the echoing memories of many worlds, the two discussed a yellow rabbit, or rather the man that had become a yellow rabbit.
The Boogeyman didn't like the yellow rabbit.
The yellow rabbit hurt the Blonde.
Badly.
That wasn't right. He had to hide her.
The Blonde responded, it's over, the yellow rabbit's gone for good, but she'd heard another shining, a new one, months ago.
A bruised glimmering in an attic room.
This interested the Boogeyman, another? They had company? They weren't the only ones?
In a new world, one they hadn't wandered yet.
Oh.
New worlds, new canons, meant new spaces walking around unfilled.
And new threats.
Really?
So they'd invited her over for breakfast.
She'd accepted.
Maybe it was time for another invitation.
For another breakfast.