She stood at the mirror, twirling hair around her fingers, inwardly panicking. Long brown hair was stitch straight and uninteresting—not at all how a bride is supposed to look. And where in the hell had everyone gone? Every time she turned around the person that had been helping her had disappeared. The dress was wrinkled in the back. I cannot get married with wrinkles.
Her mind wondered a bit. Who was it that she was marrying? That boy—a man, not a boy, but barely. The neighbor’s boy, the one with the kind disposition. His parents are nice, and they like me. They’ve arranged all this, and I’ve really gotten to know them well. It is the next natural step, isn’t it?
She looked clearly at her face in the mirror, but she couldn’t make out the features. There was a weight on her mind then. Something was amiss. She could hear someone nearby again, which was a welcome distraction.
“Can you find that little travel steamer to steam the wrinkles out of this dress?” She called out. She owned one, she knew she did—at some point, somewhere, in another life. There must be someone attending to me in this place, right? Someone…
Then it hit her all at once. There was no reason to get married to someone she barely knew. There was no reason to get married at all. None of it made sense. Run.
She did run. She ran all the way to the river, the one near the bridge. That one with all the alligators. There are always alligators. But this isn’t that kind of a dream—not the kind where she runs down the boardwalk as it falls away to the alligators waiting with open mouths. Instead, it is the kind of dream with a house. She goes to it, and there are friends—people she knows, but doesn’t quite know. Their identities are on the tip of her tongue, just out of reach, but they are a friendly presence. The house was shrouded in a gray haze. The entire world was a grey haze, so it wasn’t something one notices. The house swayed with the water, its boards decaying and the smell musty. The house was a welcome sight to her. It was unique, and sort of cozy. It beckoned to her. Her roommates beckoned too. She toured it, and felt a kinship to it—there was something about it that felt like it completed her.
The style of the house was becoming, so becoming that she became it. Somehow, taking no time or lots of time—all sense of time lost—she was the house. Her facial features were mingled on different parts. One eye blinked from a floor board. Her nose twitched from a beam. She shifted, alive with the house, her parts moving around as though she strode from one end to the other. She was trapped there with her roommates, but she was not sad. Her feelings were mixed, or maybe lost along with time.
Ten years or ten minutes passed. Alligators and water and haze swam around that house. And then, he showed up. Was it the boy—the technically a man, boy? Possibly, but there was more to him then. He had grown into a hero. He came and he pulled her from the house, not forcibly, but by some spell of good intensions.
Maybe I’ve been reading the children too many fairy tales.
This is the sort of thing the subconscious does after staring at the electric light on a laptop, in an otherwise dark room, while dosing off. That light seems to penetrate the mind, keeping ideas flowing, although the fingers have stopped typing. Unfortunately my subconscious and I have different opinions on writing—it’s always trying to come up with some crazy Alice in Wonderland stuff.
Now it is time to return to the blinding glow to nod off, and watch the subconscious show.