Tyler Lane, an eleventh grader, had asked her out this Friday and not only had she defied expectation by agreeing, but she was also planning on doing something to set expectation on its head. Christina did not have that sort of reputation—really her reputation was pretty much the complete opposite—but recent inner portents suggested to her some significant changes were in the tides. People change—who says they can’t? Alexa and Alyssa didn’t buy it, pointing out she still blushed at the word menses. Christina blushed. But a person could change, and if she was to become an important writer of her time she had an obligation to broaden her horizons. So she was a late bloomer, this gave her Character—peripeteia, they called it in drama class, a turning—but now what was needed was Material. The twins had pretty much bloomed when they were ten, so they didn’t understand that. They thought they knew everything, but they didn’t. As far as they knew, she hadn’t even had her first kiss. There were things they didn’t know. At the register the cashier pursed her lips in disapproval but rang Christina’s items silently. Cunt! trilled an outrageous voice within the reaches of Christina’s mind, with such vehemence she had the momentary thrill it might have been audible outside herself.
You see! Who would have had any suspicion a girl who couldn’t say the word menses went around calling people cunts and fat retarded cows in her head? Saucy little bitch! She caught sight of her small smile in the ceiling mirror. She paid her money but it still felt like stealing.
She returned along the same path twisting the plastic bag on her wrist clockwise and counter and saw in a furrow of earth a small rabbit hole. She stopped. It reminded her of the dream. She considered this another less welcome occult indicator of the turn inside her, the return of a recurring dream she had not had in years. It is a simple dream. She is inside the mill, as she had been once before, in that dark you can feel on both sides of your skin, and something is in here with her. The thing is the same color and smell as the dark. But she knows it’s in here all the same; there’s a difference between a place where you are the only living thing and where you are not, and something in here is alive. And there is only one place to hide: in the dark she can just make out the outline of that great black cauldron keeled to its side. Of course if she doesn’t know what the thing in here is she can’t know what it wants, if there’s even any reason to hide. But it’s a chance she can’t take so she makes her way to the cauldron and puts her hands to the lip and peers in. But what if hiding means there is no place to run? What if there is something worse inside the cauldron? Or if there is nothing in it at all? Real bottomless nothing? But there is a dark thing in this mill with her and she can feel its nonshadow fall on her, it is right behind her now and she doesn’t know what it will want if she faces it. She is paralyzed. She doesn’t know whether to turn and face it or Go Down the Hole.
And then she woke up.
“You can be such a weirdo sometimes you should just tie a ribbon around your skull and walk into the Brain Barn,” Alyssa said. (The Brain Barn was the common nickname for the Neuropathology Lab at Hemlock Acres, which housed three thousand human brain specimens and was an object of great fascination among local youths.)
Well, what of it? Some people had funny dreams. And moments where they felt that every cell in their body was made of cancer, or that when they breathed they breathed out pure oxygen and breathed in cigarette ash. And broke down into hysterical tears at that video on the Internet of the elephant that paints its own portrait, as Christina had recently in the computer lab, for no more articulable a reason than it seemed to her that all nameless sadness she had ever experienced or for that matter existed in the great
You see! Who would have had any suspicion a girl who couldn’t say the word menses went around calling people cunts and fat retarded cows in her head? Saucy little bitch! She caught sight of her small smile in the ceiling mirror. She paid her money but it still felt like stealing.
She returned along the same path twisting the plastic bag on her wrist clockwise and counter and saw in a furrow of earth a small rabbit hole. She stopped. It reminded her of the dream. She considered this another less welcome occult indicator of the turn inside her, the return of a recurring dream she had not had in years. It is a simple dream. She is inside the mill, as she had been once before, in that dark you can feel on both sides of your skin, and something is in here with her. The thing is the same color and smell as the dark. But she knows it’s in here all the same; there’s a difference between a place where you are the only living thing and where you are not, and something in here is alive. And there is only one place to hide: in the dark she can just make out the outline of that great black cauldron keeled to its side. Of course if she doesn’t know what the thing in here is she can’t know what it wants, if there’s even any reason to hide. But it’s a chance she can’t take so she makes her way to the cauldron and puts her hands to the lip and peers in. But what if hiding means there is no place to run? What if there is something worse inside the cauldron? Or if there is nothing in it at all? Real bottomless nothing? But there is a dark thing in this mill with her and she can feel its nonshadow fall on her, it is right behind her now and she doesn’t know what it will want if she faces it. She is paralyzed. She doesn’t know whether to turn and face it or Go Down the Hole.
And then she woke up.
“You can be such a weirdo sometimes you should just tie a ribbon around your skull and walk into the Brain Barn,” Alyssa said. (The Brain Barn was the common nickname for the Neuropathology Lab at Hemlock Acres, which housed three thousand human brain specimens and was an object of great fascination among local youths.)
Well, what of it? Some people had funny dreams. And moments where they felt that every cell in their body was made of cancer, or that when they breathed they breathed out pure oxygen and breathed in cigarette ash. And broke down into hysterical tears at that video on the Internet of the elephant that paints its own portrait, as Christina had recently in the computer lab, for no more articulable a reason than it seemed to her that all nameless sadness she had ever experienced or for that matter existed in the great
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