They suck in a short breath, and hold still, eyes closed. They roll over, still half in sleep, still clutched by dread. Half under their quilt, they look across their room, a dim, mostly empty, monastic space, at the pale light at the window, and they guess at the time. They blink, and feel the blanket, the down pillow under their head, and know they were dreaming, and know they were not dreaming. They remember walking back to bed again like a sleepwalker, and yet these broken memories, these impulses beyond controlling, these half-lived dreams of cages and a black wedding by night, of soft and shining skin and the yearning, almost like a child, for a much missed someone - none of these are fresh. Nightmare she is, she has dreamed these things before, and she will dream them again. Only the boy was different.
Her brown medicinal cigarillo is only half burned in the saucer on the end table. She levers up, long black hair askew. She is not the glowing bride, she is not the sexless beast in the cage. Her fingers tremble as she remembers the boy's hand, the man, the china doll, the sideshow, the cling of blood as it reached her ankles and poured into her shoes, some of it remaining when the tide washed back, sticky and warm under the soles of her bare feet. She had been ready to kick those shoes away, and dance barefoot through the slow waves.
She opens the silver vesta, stamped with twining thistles and flowers, souvenir of earthly travel. She strikes a match on the bed post, lights up, takes a long draught of smoke into her lungs.
She will sit this way for some time. She will sit, and she will forget nightmare, or pretend to. She will shrug her shoulders in.