Maze of Mendacities

The rush of seas lap at my ears. Sand spills from my head. Red stains the seafoam gathering around my feet. 

“Fair play,” I say, as coral real and reddening rise where the blood falls. “Play for fare. Fare for a play.” 

A riptide pulls me down through the ragged arms of a sea’s colourful calcareous bones. 

I see her, silhouetted against the searing sun, that Cheshire-cat smile dark on her lips. 

The sea rushes over me. 

The red of my blood seeps into the crimson of the corals. 

–

She is set on my tail. My tail is a wondrous white—sharper than the bones of ice, purer than the breath of stars. She is set on capturing a tale. 

No, you fool. Not a tale. My tail. 

I guard it closely. When I shut my eyes, it keeps close, thick and soft over the cold of my nose, like a spray of thistledown and heathers. It withers when I wake. When I wake…

…I woke in a wash of red. The woods were ablaze. Everything was red and fiery and falling. Locusts buzzed. I could smell cardamom. Carnations and cardamom. 

“Mom?” 

A woman raked a pile of leaves onto me. I spat basil and frisked wormwood from my furs. The rake shrrked against rough stone. White curls spilled from her head. 

I ducked my head and ran. A Cheshire cat smile had shone between her lips. Besides, M had short hair, pin-straight, cut across the edge of a razor. It didn’t come close. 

The underbrush yawned lazily. A thick fog snaked through the roots and canopies. The bushes reached and nipped at my pelt. 

I ran hard until I remembered it was my tail she wanted. I turned and crouched low, then. 

A hound lunged through the fog—star-flecked Cerberus of night. 

I sprang and bit. 

The night-hound swerved and disappeared into the fog. In the haste of its flight it rived the earth. 

I fell through the fissure into a tangle of threads. Silk tore tufts from my pelt, grasping and greedy. 

I fought, took the strands between my teeth and wrenched savagely—all the more when I could not open my jaw again.   

The hound of night prowled across the discombobulation of webs. 

I waved my tail—mocked the hound with its untouched whiteness—a bundle of nettle in her face, despite the desperation of my plight. 

She pounced. Her claws bore into my scruff; her teeth snapped around my ear. Red ran down my face and dripped into the blackness below as we tangled, tearing tapestries, staining threads scarlet.

A heart’s breath before my tail caught in the web, the silks snapped. We fell into the gaping abyss below. 

–

I awaken. 

“Daydreaming again?” My mother smiles at me, her teeth pearls in the porcelain of her skin, her hair shocking white against the steel grey of her eyes. Her raiment is a falling of clouds, smattered with the twinkling of precipitation. 

The hall of dance stretches from the world’s beginning to its end. The hall is monochrome. The dance is vibrant. Every colour that has never existed blazes between liquid drapery and lacquered tile, tying souls together in snarls and lines and ravelling knots. 

“Shall I not oblige observation when the hidden places of the world reveal themselves to my eyes?” I stand over the myriads swirling in song, in colour, in life. 

She stands behind me. “Will you not? 

I turn—gracious benefactor, patronising gentleman—and pull her into the whirl of wont and wanton. 

She is clothed in darkness, cut from the night and scattered with stars. Her eyes are amethysts, her hair obsidian rings. The sky envelopes us as the music surges and spins threads between our stars. I cast her away as it slows, scrub furiously at the lines of the constellations and unravel the knots in the mellowing of diminuendo.  

She steps out from the blur of songs. I catch her around the waist and dip her low into the flush of night. 

A drop of red falls onto the dark of her skin, onto the ebony of her countenance. 

Red drips onto the white of my coat, the white of my vest, the gold of my cuffs. 

Red disappears into the cascade of night, shines sharp on the scintillating of stars.

Black, and white, and red. 

“What do you kill, phantom red?” 

Not why. Not how. I grin. Finally, someone asks the right questions. 

Red rushes in the filigree of silver around her neck, like the bloom of freshly cut arteries. 

“I kill things that are alive.” I say, as if speaking to a child. 

“What is alive?” She circumvents circles of friends, knots of lovers as they pass the black and white tiles between us. “The sun lives. You could not kill it if you tried. The night lives. In every rising it kills you shortly.” 

I laugh. “Not if I’m an insomniac.” 

The night yawns. The music swells, and all is blackness. 

Her voice chases me, echoing… “phantom red, phantom white, what do you kill?” 

–

Music blares from the radio. 

“Kiki! Kiki! How much longer?” 

I jerk awake. “I told you beans not to call me that.” An easy breeze winnows over the windshield and whispers around the chrome of the convertible, past the sleek maple leathers. 

“Kiki, her hair’s in my ice cream!” 

“Kiki, it’s cold…” 

“Kiki, I know this song—sing with me!” 

Through the mirror, I glance back at my little sisters: triplets, all of them, with ebony skin, a cloud of curls around every head, looking nothing like me and exactly like each and the other, save for the eyes and the light in them. 

The one furthest right gazes out at the countryside rushing by, huge, abysmal eyes wide in wonder…yet predatory in the most peculiar perspective. 

The one furthest left runs crayons across a big sketchbook, dances a little dance to herself and sings along with the radio. The sun catches her eyes and lightens dark purple to the lustre of amethysts. 

And then there is the child in the middle. She brings me up short and makes me startle. That’s when I remember…I have no sisters. 

In her hands is a white furred fox. A plush toy of a white furred fox. She looks up and grins at me, clutching it by the tail, midnight blue eyes shining with glee. 

“Look, Kiki! A fox!” Her smiles curves into a perfect crescent—a moon, slender as a fingernail paring. 

Night falls. 

The car is parked along the seashore. The tires have sunken some ways into the beach. 

The other two girls are asleep when she opens midnight blue eyes, sits up and climbs out of the car. She lands face-first in the sand, gets up and toddles towards the sea. 

I follow her to the shore despite a vague, distant caution tightening around my chest. The moon pales the black of the sky—a shining white smile in the darkness. The sand is scattered with petals, petals of alabaster and moonlight. 

She looks up at me with those wide eyes of night. “What did you kill, Kiki? Why did you kill him?” 

I dig my toes into the turf, into sand scattered with petals, and shrug. “Why does anyone kill? I killed what hurt me. And now…I kill what will hurt me.” 

The night smiles in the crescent of the moon. Its pale light glimmers off the waves. 

Red stains the foam gathering around my feet, seeps into sand scattered with petals of alabaster. The red of her blood seeps into the crimson of the corals. 

–

He takes the headset off, and the tricksy, tumbling virtual world disappears. The room is drawn sharp, rendered and static, without swirling songs or those horrid singing souls. The walls are a sleek coal grey, lit from behind the panelling with a translucent golden light. 

In the centre of the room is a globe of opalescent white tiles; above it float holographic screens, intangible, quadrilateral screens—pictures, all. One is of his mother: a sharp, angular woman, pearls on porcelain on shocking white, save for the subtle sanguine swipe of her lips, cut along the edge of a razor. Another is a gorgeous, gruesome shot of a white rose, nestled between ribs, in the cavity where the heart should have been, red seeping into its corolla, blood where water should have been. The last is blurred, unfocused, and almost pixelated—reminiscent of attempts to capture faerie physiognomy in photograph—a young woman caught in the act of turning her face away. Scarlet silk encircles her neck: a graceful bow with trailing tails. Dark curls fall around her ebony face; there is a smudge of midnight blue where her eyes should have been. 

He closes the globe, the holographs, the running simulations, all the screens, and lies back with a contented, contemptuous smile. “Hope you're ready to dance, dreamwalker.” 

Sleep takes him, the moment the pillows cradle his fair, flaxen head. 

–

The rush of seas lap at his ears.