Dark Dreams

THE GIRL WHO DREAMED

My hands gripped the white bedsheets tightly while my lips whispered his name: "Dickson...". I tried to free myself from the dangerous world that lies between dream and reality.

"Sarah...".

His voice echoed in my mind. Thousands of cold drops of sweat swept over my body following the path traced by pulsating veins of pleasure. A gust of cold air came in through the broken window.

I woke up.

"Not him again!" I snapped, placing my hand on my forehead.

I sprang out of bed like a cat, as if that would exonerate me for what I had just dreamed. Too bad my glasses were on the nightstand. I approached again stealthily to take them as if the bed could eat me at any moment.

If only Dad knew what was going through my head, he would throw gallons of holy water on the bed after dunking me in more gallons of the liquid purifier.

But my dad wasn't there.

Another icy gust of wind filled the small, dark room. I headed to the window and looked at it, scowling. A page from a magazine for young girls, its sides covered with scotch tape, lay on the ground.

"How to boost your breast size with the Pineapple Diet" I read, taking the page from the rotten wood that served as the floor. I snorted, thinking that my interest in bombshell breasts was proportional to worries that Goldmist's anxious wealthy inhabitants might have. The paper's only purpose was to replace the broken glass. I tried sticking the page with the pineapple girl back but without success. The tape had been used too many times. I rested my hands on the windowsill and breathed in the smell of wet earth.

The room looked out onto a small garden which couldn't have been larger than a hundred square feet. It had taken me more than a month to be able to rescue all the plants on the abandoned land that we had bought two years ago. Now I could admire with delight a magnificent white-petaled rosebush, a slender tree of snow-white magnolias, and small branches of yellow camellias that were recovering little by little. Our property was separated from the adjacent one by an unkempt hedge with branches so long that they looked like the arms of hungry monsters. It was inevitable that the monsters would multiply because our shears were so old and rusty that they would even have struggled to cut my toenails.

Tap, tap.

"No, no, NO!" I shouted, running toward the rickety desk that stood in front of the bed. Two more drops and the bowl that served to catch the leak from the hole in the ceiling, already full to the brim, would overflow. It took twenty-four hours to fill up after a rainy day; another reason why I had learned to wake up at the same time each morning. Well, the fact that the only clock in the house was broken and always read twelve had influenced my decision too. I took the bowl in both hands. It was so heavy that I had to waddle to reach the window and throw the water out. I put it back in its place and sat down on the beer keg that acted as a chair for the desk.

A few inches from the keg, on the table, lay a broken mirror, a comb, Christopher's photo and a pot containing a dozen white daisies. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and had to stop myself from retching.

I was the ugliest girl I had ever seen; it wasn't surprising that even the mirror had refused to reflect me, and had broken. I had two large eyes of the same blue, which characterizes water so deep that nobody wants to explore it. Luckily, I had a big pair of glasses and long bangs to hide them. My long, emmenthal-colored hair was neither straight nor curly, just as my body was neither skinny nor fat. I wasn't tall, but not short either, and my skin was halfway between the skin of a vampire and that of a newborn piglet. I was so insignificant that even words wanted nothing to do with me. In short, I was a big question mark.