2019-07-16 - Candle Girl

"Sleep tight." Jens said. And then he left her to her own devices.

And maybe she did sleep tight. That night. Maybe she even slept tight the next night. But in the back of her mind: the image. Pale skin pressed to ground, an arduous burning along her skin; the jagged spikes of black edging from without. Just nagging. Nagging nagging. It's late. After a shift. Her feet hurt and there were a lot of big tables and she had to write a lot. She's hungry, but the prospect of preparing anything seems like a herculean task. Maybe bed. Maybe the couch. Anything to put her feet up.

She knows better than to go to bed when she's hungry, it just means that she'll wake up in a few hours starving. But getting all the way to the kitchen is just not happening. So, she compromises, she gets half way to the kitchen and ends up on the couch, her shoes get kicked off and she tugs one of the throw pillows over to tuck beneath her cheek with a yawn. If she falls asleep here, and wakes up in a few hours, at least she's closer to the kitche.

At least she didn't have to walk up the stairs on aching feet, either.

A body is heavy when it is tired. It's all relative, but now, as she sinks her head into the throw pillow and her body across the expanse of the couch, she can feel herself cruising into slumber, the world fading from her view. As if the couch and pillow were made of particularly pliant memory foam, she sinks into them, further, each breath she takes, tired and sleepy and barely conscious, weighing her down. The pillow wraps around her face, her head; the cushions of the couch envelope her legs and her torso and her arms and her shoulders and she sinks into that darkness of sleep.

Or is it. Sleep. Sleep doesn't feel like this. Or does it? She can't remember. And she can't tell if she's opening her eyes or not in the pitch darkness so profound it weighs on her in a way that it shouldn't. Darkness is absence, after all.

Sleep sure doesn't feel like this. Maybe? It's hard to really care, though. Care a lot. But then, there's a small part of herself that seems to be caring a whole lot. If only she could understand why it was flailing like that.

Oh well. She's tired, it's been a very long day, and the idea that she can catch a few undisturbed hours of sleep it too much of a draw for her to keep thinking about it. Instead she gives into that sleep.

Burning. Her eyes are burning. She can feel the heat start at the back of her head and work its way into her cornea, blistering the sclera and her pupils and her irises, eating into her skull. It's reflex to try to open her eyes but she realizes soon enough she can't. It's not that her eyes are open: she just has no eyelids anymore, as the fire from within starts to eat her flesh, eyes first. But the darkness is so heavy. It's all around her. She can see the depths of the pitch and they are endless; and though the fire inside her burns, the darkness keeps her pinned, no longer against the soft, pliable cushions of the couch, but rather a cold nothingness below that both does not support her and yet is more solid than any floor.

No...no no nononononono NO.

Ash tries, so very hard to open her eyes, to drag herself away from the cold nothingness. Can she scream? She's trying, she's trying to scream for help, for someone in the house to come help her stop burning, to save her from the fire and the nothingness.

MOVE ASH!

The mind is willing, who knows how the body is feeling at this point in time. Other than clearly betraying her.

It's not a betrayal. She can feel her muscles spasm, shiver, groan against the weight of the darkness that pins her. Her eryes are open because they have no other way to be. She can feel the heat--the blaze--spread over her skin, enveloping her in its intensity. Her skin is pale, she doesn't need to see it to notice; it burns, and that fire consumes it, like wax around a thick, ardent wick. It illuminates her surroundings, casting pallor against the pitch.

The sphere of burning light that surrounds her is not impenetrable. Jagged bits of black start to rip, sunder; it's not black, it's not: it's not shadow or darkness; it's just nothing. An absence of everything; of anything. It wrrigles, pierces, moves with jagged motions, coming for her.

Damn, stupid...what the fuck. Ash desperately wants to kick and scream, to run away from the fire that is consuming her skin. She wants away so very, very much. More screaming, soundless, except in her head maybe. That moving, that inability to move away from the fire, the thing that is coming for her, it all has a painful, visceral response. Panic. Total panic.

Panic is good. Not for her, but for something else. Those jaged bits of black suppurate ghostly shapes; formless things with eyes and teeth and long, spindly fingers that reach--reach--reach for her. She burns hotter; deeper. She can feel her skin melting into the darkness, formless, wax on fire under the high noon sun.

And the soft, sibilant whisper in ears she doesn't have anymore, a hungry hissing, wrapped around her heart, pulling at her fear...

THUD.

It's a short fall from the couch to the floor but when it's face down and flat, it can hurt.

Soon as she hits the floor she screams. She's been wanting to for so long now, a lifetime it felt like, which really. That's just one more bit of her usual dramatics edging in, despite the fact that right now it is so very much not welcome.

Whoever is unlucky enough to be home is probably wondering WTF right now, because once she starts, she doesn't stop for a little while as she shoves herself from the floor, taking a step away from the couch like somehow it betrayed her.

But no one comes. Because no one's in the house. It's just her. And the house. And that dream.