I was on the mountain again. My bare feet were cold. Really cold. Like stepping on freezer ice packs. The wind was loud but also quiet? It's hard to explain. It whooshed in my ears but everything else felt stuffed with cotton.
The angel was there. White hair flying everywhere like spiderwebs. She turned around.
It was Krivya's face.
My stomach did a flip. A bad one. Like when you miss a step on the stairs.
"You're getting closer, snail boy," she said. Her voice was weird. It sounded like the peacock from the zoo but also like my mom calling me for dinner from another room.
"Why do I keep dreaming of you?" I asked. My own voice sounded small. Like a little kid's. "Are you a memory? A ghost? A part of me?"
My toes were so cold they hurt. I wiggled them. The rock under my feet was grey and had little sparkly bits. Like glitter spilled on a sidewalk.
"What's the difference?" she said. She tilted her head. Too far. Like an owl. It looked wrong. "A memory is a ghost of a moment. A part of you is a ghost of a possibility."
I didn't get it. Not really. My brain felt fuzzy. Like tv static.
"I am both and neither," she said. She wasn't moving her mouth right. The words just came out. "I am the question you're too afraid to form."
The wind blew harder. It smelled like wet dirt and the kind of medicine my grandma used to take. I hugged myself. My pajama shirt was thin. I could feel goosebumps on my arms.
"Did I kill you?" The words jumped out of my mouth. I didn't even mean to say them.
She laughed. It wasn't a nice laugh. It was like glass breaking. Or the sound of the ice cream truck music when it's far away and distorted.
"You give yourself too much credit," she said. She took a step closer. Her feet didn't touch the ground. Just hovered an inch above the sparkly rock. "You can't kill a shadow. You can only fail to see it."
"Then who did?" My teeth were starting to chatter. Not from cold. From something else.
"The same person who is trying to bury you." Her eyes were too big. Too dark. Like holes poked in paper. "The one who fears what we represent."
"What do we represent?" I whispered.
I saw a bug crawl over a rock near my foot. A black beetle. It moved slow. I watched it. I didn't want to look at her face anymore.
"The space between worlds," she said. Her body was starting to get see-through. I could see the mountain behind her. It looked wavy. Like a heat haze on the road. "The crack where the light gets in… and the darkness leaks out."
She was fading. Fast.
"Be careful, Eryx." Her voice was coming from everywhere now. From the sky. From inside my own head. "When you stare into the abyss, it's not empty."
The beetle stopped moving. It was just a dark spot.
"It's full of all the versions of you that you've ever abandoned."
I felt a sharp pain in my palm. I looked down. I was squeezing my own hand so hard my nails dug in. Little half-moon marks.
"And one of them," the voice hissed, right in my ear now, icy cold, "is very, very angry."
I woke up.
My whole body jerked. Like when you're falling in a dream and then you jerk awake.
I was in my bed. My sheets were all twisted around my legs. They were damp with sweat. My heart was beating so fast it felt like a bird trapped in my ribs. Bang bang bang against my bones.
I couldn't breathe good.
My chest felt tight. Like someone was sitting on it. Was it asthma? Was it the dream? I didn't know.
I fumbled for my inhaler on the nightstand. My hand knocked over a water glass. It crashed on the floor. Water went everywhere. I didn't care.
I found the inhaler. Shook it. Put it in my mouth. Pressed down. Took a deep, shaky puff. The medicine taste was gross. Like chemicals and mint.
I waited. My lungs felt sticky. Like they were full of glue.
I took another puff.
Slowly, slowly, the air started to come easier. My heart slowed down a little. But the feeling from the dream didn't go away. It sat in the room with me. In the dark.
It felt more real than my room. More real than the broken glass on the floor.
The dream wasn't like a normal dream. Normal dreams are weird and then you wake up and you're like, "huh, that was weird," and you forget it by breakfast.
This was different. It was like… a message. But not a text message. A message carved on my brain. With a hot knife.
I got out of bed. My legs were wobbly. I stepped on a piece of glass. "Ow!" I hissed. A tiny cut on my heel. A dot of blood. I hobbled to the light switch.
The light was too bright. It hurt my eyes. I squinted.
My room looked wrong. My poster of the space nebula on the wall. My desk with the pencil holder. My school bag on the floor. It all looked fake. Like a stage set. Like if I touched the wall it would be made of cardboard.
Krivya's face in the dream. Her owl-head tilt. Her voice.
The space between worlds.
The crack.
I sat on the edge of my bed. The mattress squeaked. I looked at the cut on my foot. The blood was a perfect, tiny red sphere. I pressed it with my thumb. It smeared.
Real.
I was awake.
But what does awake even mean?
If the dream felt more real than being awake… then which one is which?
My head hurt. A throbbing ache behind my left eye. I got up again. Avoided the glass. Went to the kitchen to get a paper towel for my foot.
The kitchen clock said 3:17 AM. The whole world was asleep. Except me. And the memory of the dream. And maybe Krivya's ghost. Or whatever she was.
I wiped my foot. The cut was small. It stopped bleeding.
I got a broom and dustpan. Swept up the glass. The tinkling sound was too loud in the quiet apartment. I dumped the pieces in the trash. They made a final crashing sound.
I got a drink of water from the tap. It tasted like metal.
I stood there in the middle of the kitchen. The linoleum floor was cold on my bare feet. The fridge hummed. A car went by outside, its headlights painting moving squares of light on the ceiling.
I felt totally alone. But not the normal alone. A deep alone. A bottom-of-the-ocean alone.
The dream said we were the same. Me and Krivya. Thin places. Whatever that means.
Did she have dreams like this? Is that why she stared out the window with empty eyes? Was she getting messages from mountains and angels too?
I thought about the last journal entry. The experiment. The shock to the system.
Was my dream the shock? Was she trying to talk to me from… from wherever she was now?
My skin got goosebumps again.
I went back to my room. Didn't turn off the light. I just sat on my bed with the light on. I stared at the space nebula poster. The colors were swirly. Purples and blues and pinks. It was supposed to be a beautiful thing. A cloud in space where stars are born.
It just looked like a big, messy bruise to me now.
I pulled my knees up to my chest. I rested my chin on them.
The hollow feeling in my chest was back. But it wasn't empty. It was full of the dream. Full of her words. Full of cold mountain air and the taste of medicine and the sound of breaking glass.
One of them is very, very angry.
Which one? Which version of me did I abandon?
The one who was brave? The one who would have ran to save that boy at the bus stop? The one who wouldn't just stand there and freeze?
Or a different one. A worse one. The one who… who could smile when someone was dying?
I didn't want to know.
But the dream said I was getting closer.
Closer to what?
To finding out I'm a monster? To finding out the world is just a dream? To finding out nothing is real?
My eyes felt gritty and sore. But I was scared to sleep. Scared I'd go back to the mountain. Scared the angel with Krivya's face would be waiting. With more questions I can't answer.
The clock ticked.
The light bulb hummed.
I waited for morning.