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i. It starts when you're sleeping, not that long after your ex-boyfriend trades scales for howling at the moon. Something like rats scratching at the door, then something else like worms and insects crawling underneath your skin. You hear deep breaths, ragged, broken glass-jagged and heavier than sin. You hear whispers without words, sandy, dry and crackling.
You feel grave-cold breaths curling out against your skin, creeping down your cheeks and shoulders with the self-insistence of melting, like someone's holding ice cubes there and digging them into your muscles while they turn to water—then comes the rush of a freezing shower battering into your face, plastering your hair to the back of your neck, water drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-dropping everywhere in some gunfire tattoo.
And the clawing sounds get louder still. They fall into a rhythm metered out like sonnets, then like dactylic hexameter, then like nothing you've ever heard before—scritch, scratch, scritch, scratch, scritch, scratch, scriiiiiiitch—on the third or fourth night, from out of nowhere, it hits you. Where you know that sound, that beating. It's the pounding of your heart, ever-steady in the face of the unknown—you've seen so much already, so what more could come along and shock you?
You write these off as nothing more than nightmares. After all, they're to be expected, after everything that you've been through.
***
ii. But it doesn't stay limited to when you're sleeping. It comes and finds you in the daytime, first of all while you're making some spaghetti. You stare down at the boiling water and wonder what putting your hand down in it would feel like—would it hurt, most likely, but what kind of pain. There are so many words for describing the effects of pain.
You run your fingers along the handle of the strainer-pot, the creaky thing that you always worry about coming off, and you dig them into the wiry metal armature—you flick your middle finger's nail against it and an image flashes through your mind—it's that man, Peter, grinning like he's baring fangs—you flick the thing again and see a different image, a woman with angry red eyes and a tangled mane of black hair. She roars. She changes form, bones cracking and ligaments twisting as she turns into a wolf.
She charges at you and you scream—the noodles rustle in the strainer-pot and without thinking, you grab up the water, flinging it out of your pot at where she ought to be. It splashes onto the floor, a mess of liquid and the run-off that came from the noodles. And you blink at the empty space in front of you, you stare into it, wondering where the wolf could've gotten off to, where she could've gone.
And all you can think as you clean up the mess, as you sop it up into a filthy kitchen rag, is, thank God nobody saw that, thank God no one was here to hear me, thank God I'm not in school right now.
***
iii. about a week into your nightmares, you're in a garden—you think you're asleep, but you can't be sure—did you fall asleep? did you sink into your sheets and slip into unconsciousness? have you even slept at all since anything that's happened to you, because your thousand-yard stare and the hollows underneath your eyes don't entirely suggest someone who's been sleeping lately—but you think that you're asleep, you must be, because there's no way for all of these flowers to bloom together outside of a hothouse. but then again, maybe you're in one—there's no reason why you couldn't be.
they all come into focus around you slowly—irises and azaleas and cherry blossoms and forget-me-nots and love-lies-bleedings and so many other species that you don't care to twist between your fingers. dirt squishes between your bare toes, underneath the soles of your naked feet—you dig into the soft earth, just to feel the worms twisting up and around your digits as you walk forward, further into the garden, past the trellises and the controlled environments, the polite flowers, and into what's more like a jungle. trees reach up with gnarled, twisted, clawing branches into an ink-dark, deep, unfathomable sky and vines climb up them, clinging to the bark with blooms so bright, they have to be somehow poisonous.
and at the center of it all, when you've walked so far that your legs ache and you can't fathom going on, you slump into a pomegranate tree. you know better than to trust its fruits, but still you pluck one, just before you slouch down to the ground. still, you claw into it like the branches claw into the sky, crack at it until it bursts, until the seeds spill out like little rubies—and before you can slide one past your lips, you get a shiver, something shocking up your spine—and the feeling of fingernails scraping at the back of your neck, a whisper without words seeping out and curling down your cheek, your neck, your collarbone.
that's when you notice that you've been sitting in a rosebush this entire time. that's when you notice the thorns sticking out of your flesh at all odd angles. that's when you notice that there aren't even any roses on this bush—there are places where they should've grown, places where they've withered and died and fallen apart, but there aren't any roses left.
***
iv. She finally speaks to you on the seventeenth night—you know how many days it's been because you've counted them all in your journal, kept a fastidious record of everything you remember from your dreams. This has happened to you once before—never again, not as much as you have any say in it—which, it occurs to you, you just might not.
But she smiles when she comes to you, pallid and wide-eyed with a wild mess of hair, clawing her way up out of the earth and curling her hand around your ankle, caressing it gently, like a lover would—and you just can't look away from those beautiful, red-ringed eyes of hers. Not that you would if you could. You're transfixed, staring at her as she whispers—cold-voiced, cold air creeping up your leg—
"You're a medium, Lydia. And I need your help. I'm coming back so we can get what's rightfully fucking ours."