Lavender: a Strangely Slipstream Novelette

Travel

She crept back to her secret salt lick under a cloth behind a trash bin so she could go back to Lavender for the last time she would be able to see her parents or her sister. She could warn them so they could stay out of Lavender and not be killed. She'd have to flee before they grabbed her and hide as they'd likely call the police.

Stopping thinking to enter the Salt Meditation was harder at that moment than it ever had been, and she heard voices approaching. She held her breath, closed her eyes, and wavered off to the time-share world.

When she successfully reached her house on Lavender, as she was arranging the slightly wilted Bloodflowers in vases, she heard an insistent knocking on the door. She opened it, thinking it was her family come early.

Sandcastle. She closed the door in his face.

"Ooooo, someone needs to process," said the DayMare. Annatalia turned around swiftly, to see her sitting in the living room. "I let myself in through the entryway: your vulnerability was wide open. You need to work on strengthening your boundaries." She wagged her head and turned her head sideways, squinting her eyes at her knowingly.

Annatalia pushed her with great style and panache. The DayMare looked crestfallen.

"Take the Woven Traffic to any other alternative world you like. But you can't stay in this one. And take Sandcastle with you." The DayMare tried to make a quick sob sound like a hiccup, and they left, muttering.

She was going to have a hard time facing her parents. She loved dinners with them, feeling like their beloved innocent child, so cuddly. She hated how she hid from them the most important thing about the future of reality. She could never tell them before that about her suggestion leading to the annihilation of the world that they'd so carefully designed and brought her to, raised her in with such attentive kindness.

They'd created it to give her someplace beautiful to grow up instead of having to only navigate the ugly realism of Earth. Really, they did it to give her place to not never grow up, but to keep that fairy-like, ballet-like perfection of a little girl who liked to show off lavender Easter dresses.

She liked repaying them by cooking great meals and proving entertaining creature-plants. The Goat sang a tragic aria outside. Annatalia opened the door and fed it some Bloodflowers, which made a mess on the steps that a couple Bloodling stragglers cleaned up, scraping it off the stone with their sharp saw-teeth. She noticed the teeth were already bigger than last time she looked.

She stepped back, unsure if they might be able to saw off the end of her little toe sticking out of her dirt-encrusted sandals. She half wanted to throw them in the neighbor girl's face for creating such little cliches.

She hoped her special touches would be poetic enough to offset any impulsive discussions about her sister's potential removal to another world, and her revelation about potential destruction. She'd hoped to be able to chatter about which one timeshare be the best choice to send her sister to, about the relative pluses and minuses of all the enticing ones. But she felt sick. It was all so useless.

All the worlds were awful.

She'd tried so hard to do the right thing with her swaggering suggestions to the Anti-Heroes the year before, had wanted in her heart to be a good activist for the sake of all, unselfishly, without bias. The evening was escalating into a more important event than she had prepared for. Sooner than she was ready.

Then, she felt sick. It was like a buzzing in her ears that continued throughout her body and tangled up in her stomach. The typical ordinariness of her feelings of rebellion cracked the ceiling of the beautiful world of her parents.

The house shook and the ground rumbled. A plate and some bowls fell off the cupboard. One of them smashed.

She spied her family's faces through the window when she went to pick it up. They were smiling, with their arms around each other, ready to knock on the fragile door, which was already starting to break in two. The sound echoed throughout Lavender, which rocked and shuddered.

She had no need of opening it. It fell apart between them, revealing her family's smiles crumpling, her mother's arm outstretched with an upraised fist, ready to strike the wood and announce their arrival.

Annatalia stood straight and quoted resolutely: "I am death, the mighty destroyer of worlds."

That was a powerfully articulate enough quote to ensure no further cracks appeared just yet. Her father looked especially confused. She'd been trying hard not to think about her mother's adorable pug nose, the way her father's shirts were always crumpled, her sister's lopsided grin. She held back tears of love. She had to be honest.

She couldn't hide who she was any more.

She decided she would straightforwardly reveal her secret at dinner. Doing so in a normal linear way ran the risk of cracking Lavender entirely and ruining it ahead of schedule before people escaped, depending on how unstable it was elsewhere, how the interstitial supports were holding up. But she couldn't hold it back and make it oblique and atmospheric. The predictably universal truth of human imperfection was bursting out of her. She was like her sister, just an ordinary teenager who could never live up to her parents' ideals of decorum.