The Path Between Two Worlds

"There goes my baby...wo-o-o-a-oh..."

Michi rolled over and groaned, her body slightly restricted by the sheet pulled taut over her middle. She palmed the surface of her night table until she felt her phone and glanced upward briefly to turn off the alarm. Snuggled underneath the comforter, she drifted back into a slumber.

"She is ma-ah love...there goes my baby..."

She roused herself from sleep with a growl. She was awake now, and there was no going back to sleep.  Light rain pelted the windows and she found that her memory failed her; she neither knew what time or day it was. The short moment in which she viewed the screen of her phone escaped her, and the dreary day began to blend in with all the others.

Michi's bedroom was composed of a small twin bed with soft teal sheets and fluffy white comforter, a light wooden night table that carried a lamp and a book from which she read nightly. A dusty dresser and desk where notebooks lay strewn about with various verses and small poems or sections of prose she'd memorized. On the northernmost wall, there opened a door to her closet, a decidedly messy place where her clothes hung in a monochrome row of tops and assorted cardigans.

She placed her glasses on the lower bridge of her nose and tossed the comforter back in an unceremonious move. Her feet made contact with the ground, and she shivered at the thought of further exiting her warm haven. Still, she had menial plans for the day.

She dressed comfortably and rolled her head backward, eliciting a crack and some relief to her weak bone structure. She was a small woman, with short black hair that didn't go past her shoulders and a stature that didn't allow her to reach the items on her top shelf without a step stool or death defying stunt. She yanked her desk chair out and pushed aside the papers that littered her workspace.

The laptop flipped open and she commenced to writing a new story.

Michi began by describing a dream that she'd had the previous night, one where someone had poisoned the school food, which had resulted in several premature deaths and a homeless man who had in his possession something that he shouldn't have had in a large boot. A woman was looking for him, desperately trying to acquire the contents of the shoe, and when he was found, on a bus in the middle of the night, every passenger of the vehicle, including the homeless man, was crushed and therefore deceased.

Enter. Tab.

She began to recount her dream from the two previous nights, the only recurring one she'd ever had.

It began in a room with pink and white lace and porcelain dolls in  cotton candy colored dresses. The pillows were embroidered, the walls were painted a strange deep blush. A pink telephone rang in the corner of the room and a mechanic voice enunciated the order to answer. She did. A heavy, consistent breathing was the result on the other line. She hung up, and in an instant, she was swimming in greenish, semi-opaque waters. A skeleton trailed her.

She'd woken up in a sweat the past two mornings.

Enter. Tab.

The people around her moved as if they were in a stop motion film. The waved needles and string and sewed randomly throughout their placid, stitched faces, for no other reason than to do so. The ground was spotted with red. Michi cringed as a needle was handed to her and she found that she had no control over her movements. She followed suit.

Enter. Tab.

She was bloated and dying. She waddled over to the floor and her vision blurred. Her lungs were suppressed. She was going to die. Her limbs became heavy and every blink felt more permanent than the last. She was going to die. Her family surrounded her, all seemed resolved to her fate. They waved to her and she felt like calling to them, but could not will her lips to pronounce the words. Her eyelids shut. The rest of the dream was black.

Enter. Tab.

A lanky, distorted woman with purple skin and a craned neck followed her around deteriorating walls, through deteriorating halls, muttering threats about her dismemberment, her demise, her consumption. She moved slowly, but so did the woman. Constant chills assaulted the back of her neck, her chest, the pit of her stomach.

Enter. Tab.

People were on fire and she could do nothing. She stood still and watched them burn at the stake, but could not hear their screams. Why couldn't she move? A shadow moved toward her with a match. She realized that she was restrained. Tied to something. She was bound to a stake. She was bound to be burned.

Enter. Tab.

She was alone, and at sea, and something rumbled beneath her, just barely breaching the surface. Something dark blue and slimy, lengthy and mesmerizing, curling the boat that she sat in. Resigned to her fate, unclear as it was, one thing obvious, should the creature rise above water, death was certain. It was not meant to be, however. A worse destiny awaited her. The boat, free of leaks and flooding, began to sink into the water until she was entirely submerged, and came face to face with the creature.

Michi found, without her knowledge, that tears had gathered in her eyes. Her fingers lifted from the keys.

Over the course of weeks, weeks of rain and cloudy days and waking to the Drifters at the same time, how many dreams had she had? Did they flee her memory? Were any of them sweet?

Sweet dreams, people said.

Michi did not like rainy days. Michi did not particularly enjoy her alarm song. She did not relish the daylight nor did she feel pride in her poems and prose, in her personalized room. So, for the first time in those many weeks, she pushed back from her computer and let the pages, which she'd balanced her elbows on, flutter to the ground in unimportant shuffles. She slipped back into her bed, the warmth of which had gone completely, and felt, as her tears were released, that being awake was a mediocre solace.