Chapter Text
Jude walked through a forest path strewn with golden leaves, amongst trees hanging with ripe, tempting looking fruit. She knows this path well even though she’s never been here before. Her feet are bare and covered in muck, but the white hem of the dress she wears is pristine even though it grazes her ankles. If this wasn’t a dream, she would have found that detail quite odd. The material felt like air against her skin. No, it felt as light as a thought.
She heard snatches of laughter from just beyond the trees. She smiled without understanding why she felt so buoyant. A twig snapped under her feet, and she looked down to see that her foot was bleeding, but she didn’t feel any pain, and anyway, she was near to the end of it now.
She could see the two people waiting for her now. It seemed like she came here to visit every night these days, even though she hadn’t seen her mother in years, not since the disease had taken her years ago. But her mother was healthy and whole now, smiling down at her with the same yellow cat-slit eyes as Jude’s sister, Viviene.
The man next to her was smiling at her, too. His teeth were pointed, and the fingers on the hand he held out to her ended in sharp, black claws. She reached for it, anyway, knowing that this was how it was meant to be. There was no laughter in the distance anymore. There was nothing but this smiling man with sharp teeth, her dead mother, and a dark pressure that seemed to squeeze her heart. It felt like fear.
I wake with a start, exactly ten seconds before my alarm is about to go off. I grab for my phone and quickly turn it off before it can wake my twin sister, Taryn, who is still sound asleep on the other side of the room. I’ve been having the same dream every night for months now, and it wakes me with my heart pounding and an inexplicable fear filling the very marrow of my bones like clockwork at the darkest moment before dawn breaks.
I try to control my breathing, but they still come out in shuddering gasps. I pull my blanket around me tighter and hug my knees to my chest as if curling in on myself will protect me from the baseless terror that seems to plague me every night. I don’t understand what this is or why it bothers me so. Vivi believes it’s some kind of repressed trauma from losing mom all those years ago that I never quite got over, but it doesn’t feel like this is a fear of the past. This feels like the dread of something terrible to come.
The more I try to think about it, the more difficult it is to hold on to any semblance of sense. The details, already vague and dreamlike, slip out between my fingers like sand in an hourglass. The sun rises outside, and the rays of light creep into the room I share with my sister through the half-drawn curtains.
My sister shifts in her sleep as the sunrise touches her face, and she opens her eyes groggily to the morning. She is soft and warm in all the ways I am not, and moments like these make me feel like I am gazing into a mirror. We are identical but flipped. We are mirror images of each other. She notices me looking at her and grins.
“You’re still wearing that silly thing.”
I look down at the strand of rowan berries peeking out of my haphazardly buttoned pajama shirt. When we were young, mom used to make us necklaces from the rowan berry bushes that grew in our yard, and after she passed it turned into a sort of tradition in the family. We wear them for luck on days when we have a recital, or important exams, or a driving test. I’ve taken to wearing them on a daily basis since the nightmares have begun to haunt me. Maybe I am dealing with some kind of repressed trauma.
“You can never have too much good luck,” I tell her.
“Ain’t that the truth.” Our older sister, Viviene, stomps into our room, already fully dressed and throws open our curtains all the way. I squint at the sudden light hitting me in the face and grumble something incoherently, but Vivi ignores me and flops on to the edge of my bed.
“You guys are going to come to the gig tonight, right?”
Vivi is in a rock band that recently signed with a major label. She was always different, but the kind of different that made her alternative rather than an outcast. She gets to play music at music festivals, now. She also has a talent for charming you into doing mischief with her.
I shared a look with Taryn. She chews on her lip, but I’m the one to speak up. “You know we want to, Viv. But dad is going to ground us for a decade if he finds out overnight. He isn’t happy about it with you, but at least you’ve graduated. He thinks of you as an adult.”
She waves a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about dad, I’ll handle it. Besides, it’s not like I’m dragging you guys to a different state. We’re practically going to be camping out in our own backyard. If you want, you can probably just trek back home after the show is over.”
She grins mischievously before adding, ”But then you’ll miss out on the real fun of the festival.”
It’s difficult to resist Vivi, so we don’t. “We’ll be there.” Taryn answers for us both, and Vivi springs off my bed with a whoop and charges out of the room like a storm.