A Pocket Full of Posies
She'd made a terrible mistake, she knew. Sometimes she just got so frustrated she spoke without thinking. Sometimes she was too brash and unforgiving. She could be selfish and cruel. She knew she was forgetting something important, some other mistake that was all her fault. But she couldn't remember what it was.
She was in a ballroom dressed in a gown plucked straight from her fantasies. Silver flowers were woven into her hair, and the white ballroom she was in shimmered, incandescent. She had trouble focusing - the walls seemed both near enough to create a sense of claustrophobia and impossibly far away. The air smelled vaguely floral, as though they were in a forest or garden. It was the perfect scene for a princess, missing only a perfect prince. She wanted her prince charming, needed to find him. He'd been there in her dreams, spiriting her away to a far off land of beauty and adventure. She had always been different, but this time she would be important. Beautiful figures wearing hideous masks spun around her, enchanting and terrifying all at once. They reminded her of someone.
Someone thrust a box at her and she stared at it in bewilderment. Was this hers? Was this the important thing she was missing? The strange man - was he a man? - holding the box opened it and laughed when she recoiled from the snake inside. Everything here seemed beautiful on the outside and sinister within. If this was a dream it was a somewhat alarming reflection on her subconscious. But it was all so confusing she hardly knew. Still, the dread in her stomach telling her something was wrong, terribly wrong, coiled tighter.