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Third night in a row and she’s coated with a thick film of sweat when she wakes. 3am, an hour that belongs to the dead. Cheryl tries not to remember the dream but it screams at her, tugs at the corners of her eyes with nails that shriek and scrape.
It was a room, a hallway, it returns in flashes. It was a coffin, a bloated body by the lake, blue fingers and nails full of stones and black holes where the eyes used to be, corners of rooms illuminated in bright red light. The water flushed dark, her dream’s embellishment giving it a tide, a tempest, a cold and brutal storm. She always was dramatic.
The only way she knows to cope is to lie with him; curl up in his arms as they were in utero, their matching arms and legs and eyes locked and warm. The hallway is longer now, his bed so cold it feels damp. She can’t stay long, or she’ll be pulled under, too.
They never let her see the body. All she knows she has gathered from rumour; his face, eaten by carrion-birds. His hair all but gone, torn out in fistfuls, used to line nests. Strewn on the floor.
When they were kids they were all but indistinguishable. Long red hair, pale faces, bright eyes. Even their parents sometimes couldn’t tell the difference, so they made him cut it all off. He disappeared from her all at once that day, no longer twin-twin, but something else. “A Boy”, her mother told her, like it meant everything, but that wasn’t it. Something simpler, smoother. Still it wasn’t like this.
Sleep is gone. When she closes her eyes, she sees whirlpools.
She gets out of bed quietly, pulls on one of Jason’s old sweaters and makes her way downstairs, out of the front door, silent. On the way, she collects, as she has started to do; her mother’s thin cigarettes from the box in the hallway she thinks is a secret. A box of matches, from the fireplace in the first reception room. Not shoes, nothing else. Takes her phone because it’s a lifeline, but she can’t think of anyone who’d want to hear what she has to say.
Sitting on the front porch, she lights the matches. Burns a few, burns her fingers, coughs around the cigarette when it is finally lit. It’s not familiar yet, but she’s sure it will be. She’s seen them; movie-stars, her own mother, the girls on the street. The way their lips close around it, so practised; the intake of breath that looks, feels, like relief; even at a distance. She wants it so badly. Relief.
She is dizzy. Her eyes sting.
Hours pass and she has to leave. She doesn’t know what she did; watched the horizon for signs, portents, auspicious clouds. Watched for him. I’m here, I tricked you, isn’t that funny?
These strange twilight hours never were significant before. Now they’re everything; she emerges from the chrysalis she weaves all day long, and is raw and pink and boneless in front of the sun’s rise.