Wildflowers

          Mira went to pick up Damian’s pen off the floor. He thought about stopping her, to say not to bother, but instead he just walked over by her. For some reason, he didn’t feel like he needed the pretense of being highly apologetic. She just struck him as not being that kind of person.         "I mean, it's hard to describe," he said, "but if I had to pick a 'nicest person in the school' for some reason, I'd pick you, intuitively. I mean, it would be kind of a leap of faith, so I'd have to hope the consequence for failure wasn't... like..." he paused.                    She seemed to be hiding her face, just a little. And he noticed she was quite flush -- her pale skin was cherry red. Like blood, in the snow.                    He didn’t know where the thought had come from...

Day One           Mira had been here before. Countless times, in fact.           In her mind, over and over, it was always the same – she had her books, and her thoughts, and could never escape their gravity, always merely at the threshold of broaching some new change.            She didn’t know what it was. It was like the world had a veil cast upon it, enshrouding everything where the material world crossed with the aspects of her dreams… and she knew if she encountered these dream figures – if she pulled back the veil – she would see whether dreams could leave the domain of wish and travel into the world of solid things, where they would have to become real… or if they would reveal themselves to be as wisps… ephemera that were only ever illusorily here; only ever potential.           But today, it was like some unseen force pushed her up to him. When she was ...

          Day Unknown           Aidra was far, far from home. So far that whether it was a distance in time, or in space, was a matter of semantics.           So far that home, now… meant anywhere with stars.           “Aidra…” the darkness, itself, spoke to him. “Aidra… you gave me a voice.” “Your riddle, Sphinx,” he replied.  “Aidra… It is in my body. It is in the sound your beloved world of light makes when it shouts into my cavernous heart.” “Everything flees…” Aidra said. The world and his mind broke against one another like the waves and the shoreline. “No, it does not.” “You are nothing to be afraid of,” Aidra said. “No, I am not. And I am.”           “You are all there has ever been to be afraid of?”            “I am.”            “I know your n...

Damian saw a spectral-looking girl coming down the hallway, lit in the pallor of fluorescent lights whose reflection shimmered like astral creatures in the faux-marble flooring. It was Mira. He recognized her from his acting class, and the way she always seemed… well, odd. He could never really place what it was.  After a moment, he realized he had been looking at her for an unusually long amount of time, and his mind snapped away and he began rummaging through his bag.  He pretended he was lost in the cacophony of student’s voices and slamming lockers, and that there was no world outside of his backpack, as if he had disappeared into its somewhat neatly ordered depths.  He was looking for something: a small notebook his dad had given him, quarantined in a front pocket away from the potential to be obliterated by a rogue history tome, were unseen forces to loose it to wreak havoc on everything else around it.      He noticed the world around him had grown...

Day One Mira woke up early, the sun faintly lighting up the horizon where ashen clouds roamed silently over the low, distant buildings of the still sleeping town.  She felt peaceful as she inhaled and exhaled gently, her eyes drifting open to take in the blank ceiling overhead, austere but non-threatening. Then, as if following some subtle rhythm that permeated the waters of the dream world, she closed her eyes again and drifted part way back to whatever place she had just come from, whatever dream journey she had just taken. But she knew if she stayed that way too long, she’d just get drowsy… So she sighed, and pulled herself upright, imagining that she was Dracula in his coffin, and opened her eyes. Her pink, wooden dresser and the oval mirror that her grandma gave her – ringed by an ornate lattice of metal, wrought into vines – loomed behind her outstretched arms, just past the foot of her bed. “Bleh!” she said, like Dracula. And she imagined for a minute that she had never seen...