Requiem for the Fallen

by Tabitha Vohn

  ***

  That was the first night that she had the dream again.

  She awoke in her childhood bed, the wallpaper of red roses and the pink-striped comforter, the lace curtains rustled in the moonlit air through feather cracks in the windowpane that had swelled in generations of winters and had never opened properly. But the light was different; cast in a pinkish glow, the same glow that morticians use to light dead bodies at viewings. It is the pink of afterlife, the pink of nightmares. It made the skin of her belly look like it was turned inside out, a labyrinth of canals and succulent fruit.

  Her arms were heavy, her whole self felt weighted down. She was not tied to the bed; she was drugged and paralyzed. It was all she could do to keep her eyes open, let alone lift her head. She smelled pine and a darker, pungent smell, like damp earth under tree roots softened and rotted with rain. She felt a pressure deep inside her belly, a pinch and burn and rough scrape against the tender undersides of her core. She lifted her head and saw the man. Black swath of hair, emaciated limbs painted from wrists to shoulders. His skin glowing unearthly in the sickly prim light. She couldn’t see his face, only the oily crown of his pointed head. She saw a brief glint of his eyes- one brown and one…white, empty- when he sensed her sensing him; his eyes flashed as empty as glass, an empty vessel reflecting back through the nothingness it possesses.

  He was biting her belly, taking her hard, bending her like an inverted rocking chair, and she couldn’t move. Her mouth opened sharply, and she awoke before he could finish, feeling the last of her shudders, the pain in her abdomen acute and piercing.

  She walked in half-blindness to the bathroom and found the box of tampons. She popped two leftover painkillers the doctor had prescribed for her head before returning to bed. She climbed beneath the patchwork quilt and pulled her knees to her chest, breathing slow, methodical breaths to slow the turning lava in her gut. The glint that breaks through the silvered clouds behind the peek-through of curtains casts a sinister glow in the night.

  Tabitha wished she could pin a name to that face that’s stuck in her unconscious mind’s eye. It’s not him. She shivered with the remembrance of her arms heavy at her sides, and the weight of his body against hers, piercing and distant as alabaster. Her heart felt sick, trapped in an unwanted memory, and the dream, and all that had happened earlier that night. She didn’t sense the breath of an enemy crystallizing against the frosty glass.

  The reeds and rushes bent against the water, and Tabitha turned a weary head to the wall, allowing herself to miss the stronghold of heavy arms and the deep scent, rich as amber, the affirmation of a heartbeat beneath her palm, the lullaby of his voice, and the absolute feeling of safety…