6. Dream Interlude (Vignette)
"What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you held that flower in your hand? Ah, what then?" -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The ambulance sped down the road, a team of paramedics working frantically to keep life in the two fragile forms on the stretchers. Helga's mind flitted like a butterfly trapped in a jar, swirling through memories; her sister's trilling giggle, the smell of alcohol on her mother's breath, the coldness in her father's eyes, the taste of Arnold's lips that summer at the beach. It settled on one memory, one faint image, that grew and grew, plunging her into something that was not quite a dream and not quite death—but a little of both.