The Venantium Auallonia Trilogy: Midsummer Sky

Chapter 4: The Nightmare

"Now you can judge those I condemned above and judge how such men have offended, have become the origin of all your evils."

—Dante Alighieri, Paradisio, Canto 5

I guess one could say the events of my morning were that of a nightmare. Not like the nightmare of which you dream of with a small finite fear. No. Fear to me was not like fear to anyone else. Fear was the relapse of minimal time that all you can do is stand there and watch. Your feet become grounded; you grow frigid. It takes your dreams and cuts them into fragments; so all there is left is despair, because you cannot alter fear. In fact, fear, instead of taking a grand exit after causing such tragedies, embeds itself into every crevice left in your life. That is what is known as the human doubt. That is what it did to me, and so it shall with all the others as it haunts true life on a day to day basis. My fears have always been common ones: bugs, snakes, heights, death and the like. I have never known that my fear of death would extend to others. My friends were few and hard to come by, but a statement of fear could change all that within a matter of moments. As I woke up, the sun beamed directly in my eyes. Damnit, Patrick, you were supposed to buy blinds and curtains, I grumbled to myself, rolling back into the fluffy confines of my bed pulling the multi colored covers of my bed over my head.

I had thought maybe, just maybe, I would at least wake up in a good mood after the events of last night. It had been such a long time since I could safely say id gain a remote but significant sense of happiness. I didn't expect to get so in depth with Gabriel but there was just something about him that was so genuinely comfortable; I almost told him everything. Instead I summarized. Surprisingly, he didn't care much for the stories of my elusive ex-boyfriend, Emery. He wanted to know me. That's it, only me. My favorites and my fears, music, habits, everything. The most ironic part? He had lived most of his life so far on his own because he had parents he hated deeply, and he has had only one girlfriend in his whole life named Cosette. She had turned out to be a major slut; sleeping with all of his friends and their friends for sex and probably money. Up until the very end he had loved her until a year ago she dumped him for some fifty year old UPS delivery guy who had hit on her numerous times. Can you say moronic?

"DAWN! Dawny, come out here now! You need to see this...," shrieked a familiar voice from the other side of my bedroom door. Patrick appeared at my door with a wild-eyed, immobile look on his face. I knew that look; he only made that expression when he was trying to hold back tears or sadness. As gay as he was, he always had trouble expressing sadness for some reason. I had only just opened my eyes, but my confusion must have been clearly written across my forehead. My eyes still felt heavy having just been in the throes of sleep.

I rolled over onto my stomach and smothered my cheek into then white, downy pillow mumbling as I did so, "Just a few more hours of sleep, Patrick, please! I have a six hour shift later."

"Actually, I highly doubt you'll be working tonight at all. In fact, you may want to pick up the newspaper later and look for a new job. Ash's studio is on 7 News. There's been a massacre, and I'm not kidding." His eyes had gone wide with shock of the knowledge and his skin had flushed a sickened white.

"What do you mean a massacre?" I shivered, remembering that we didn't have normal heating in our hours, but I could hear the crackling of the little fireplace in the other room as I shrugged on my X Files hoodie rushing out of my chilly bedroom. I was targeted only on one thing: the universal remote. I grabbed it off the coffee table, and turned up the volume on the soundless reporters mouthing words like old miss-calculated Japanese movies. Their voices raised and I could finally hear words to go along their TV segment.