NOTHING IS STRAIGHTFORWARD. Nothing is as it seems…
As in life, so in dreams.
To bring the two together, it was important to stay still, to concentrate, not to blink. It was a ritual, a kind of seance, conducted in the early hours, when the rest of the house was quiet, when the rest of the house was sleeping. She sat on the floor, the dog stretched out by her side, his thick brass collar gleaming in moonlight that was shining bright through the window and making patterns, casting sharp, blue shadows on the wall opposite.
That was where she’d seen it before.
A tower. A glass tower, glass from top to bottom, all lit and aglitter. Other lights flashed and flowed around it, red, blue and silver, like a stream diverted. In the tower was a room, all white, a white box, a white cube. Inside the cube, a boy lay on a bed, not moving, his eyes sightless. The boy was as white as the sheets tucked about him, as white as the walls that surrounded him, but he wasn’t dead, neither was he dying: he lay somewhere between unknown and unknowing, alone between two states of being, machines keeping him alive, machines doing the breathing for him, machines that she did not know or recognize, machines such as Mrs Shelley’s doctor might have invented.
She put her hand, star shaped, against the cool, smooth glass of the window. The boy needed her help but she didn’t know how to reach him, how to give it.