Question Sleep?
part six: dreaming
He imagines himself sitting at the desk under the viel, white knuckled and his hands clutching the remains of music and green ink. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake plays in the background, the dark, deep shadows of the room sneaking up on him like that way a man could; grinning white teeth all aglow.
They're playing something like tag in the night time, he and he his sister, and while she flies across the open field looking for his hiding place, where he could possibly be, he lies as if dead in the wet tall grass.
Still.
Breathing in the scent of moon and moist earth, imagining the feel of her ruined cotton dress and the cuts on her soft legs, sliced discreetly by that same fragrant cradle and the quartz gravel under it. Why is he hiding from her? Why is he curled like the child he is inside the earth?
"Subaru! Subaru, where are you? I give up!"
Her skin reflects off the surface of that humming evening, glittering scales of beatles passing the lamp of a firefly, ferocious and evil sparkle, like the dull maroon of blood spilled in the name of God.
Hokuto's voice cracks; her girlhood is melting away.
"Subaru.. please?"
Oh how I love you, let me count the ways.
The scene is dazzling, shimmering in the far distance only a mirage of some sparkling, eternally new dream -- he always forgets, the green memories drowning in absinthe and the river Styx, and causing the leaves above him to spiral and mix with the foul black night time. Piano strings leave marks on his arms, but in him, they just pretend to write a symphony, one silent and one accompanied by the chorus.
Seishirou-san..
He lie in the evening, pale scene of liquids and succulent vines changing only when he started to forget to hold onto the string, the string connected to the last end of the world when the mirage dropped off into nothing, and he wished for it.. there he was. Coin-sized spider walking on glass before it starts to sink, and Subaru was there, eyelids sewn open with invisible thread.
"Watch this," the spider said, and he felt crystal shards push through his back, and Subaru quivered animally, agonized, unable to move.
"It keeps on going," the spider said, "though only for a little while."
"I see," he whispered, the tears blurring the scene from view, "I don't want to anymore."
"No, you don't... not yet."
The sky turned, and he fell away through the glass, sinking away to the bottom and curling into a spiral -- like the leaves had done -- around his middle, the thin trail of blood curling like smoke to the above.
He cried out, the sound being lost as he landed into a white room, his legs broken and his heart lying beside him. He looks down and sees the rest of the room through the hole in himself where that precious burden should be resting, and it's all in film negative, in shades of bloody brown and deep black like the quiet vulgarity of sleep.
Her legs are blurred, and her fingers, solid and calloused from hours of working at the sewing machine, curled around his. Someone tall and in black watched from above, but he can't bring himself to look up.
"A lilacs life is so short, it seems like only a week." she says. He remembers a week of reaching to get them, on the tips of his toes and with the sliding fabric of his gloves, unable to imagine what the petals must feel like.
"Or even a day." He remembers how after that day, they seemed to melt under the rain.
"In that time, it flowers and multiplies, and it grows larger, spreading the sweet smell it has from there, and outward."
"They seem so beautiful, from the inside of a car out in the rain. All blurry like paintings get when they're old."
Vines were growing in the fabric of her skirt.
"But.."
"Lilacs are surrounded by poison ivy. And when you reach to touch the blossoms, as pretty and inviting as they may be, the ivy which is so mixed up with them touches your skin and makes it itch until you bleed."
"Is that true, Hokuto-chan?"
"Yes, it's true." she says, smoothing down the oily leaves, which meander downward to her ankles. Subaru wonders if it's really true, but he dares not move to touch her, nor does he let go of her hand, which is still soft and perfumed.
"Why do people love them then?"
Her smile, so strange when combating the grim reality of her unfamiliar words, widened; and for the flash of moonlight that he saw it in, she was more like Monou Fuuma than his sister could ever be.
"Because they wish they could be like them."
Then, with frozen lips the color of ice and snow, pressed against that vicious countenance, he saw. That cruel smile against his sadness that was just as cold, but when together, melted. And he woke up.