Träumer

I’ve started to hate dreaming.

I dream about dark rooms and cages made of rose vines. Where the air feels like syrup as I breathe and leaves the taste of poison on my tongue, heavy and bitter and dark. Where the tips of thorns graze my skin; feather-light but still enough to draw beads of blood. I am made of glass in those dreams. I am pulled in a dozen different directions. I am lost. I am broken. I am drowning in the dark and the scent of caramel and sweet, suffocating smoke.

I dream about bright lights and castles made of crystal. Where I am falling from impossibly high towers and balconies. Where there are courtiers and jesters and all manner of delightful monsters and I am not sure if I am one of them or something else entirely. I am trapped in mirrors in those dreams. I am forced to run just to stand still. I am confused. I am falling. I am losing myself in dances and impossible colours and beautiful, terrifying eyes.

I dream about glass walls and empty corridors. Where there are clocks surrounding me and time is moving too fast and too slowly all at once. Where I am chased by indistinct shapes with jewels for eyes and teeth and I have nowhere to run to. I am falling apart into pieces of clockwork and porcelain in those dreams. I am terrified. I am dying. I am feeling my legs start to fail me and forgetting how to breathe and I am unable to stop even for a moment.

So instead I lie awake and restless and too aware of the sound of my own breathing and the rise and fall of my chest. And then I am in a darkened room with a cage of rose vines, and I realise that it has started all over again.

Sugar and String

It started with a sugar mouse. Nothing complicated. Just a sugar mouse in a little brown paper bag and endless amusement that you could actually make something like that out of sugar and a piece of string.

After she finished it, she tied the piece of string around her pinkie finger and wore it for the rest of the day, just because.

From then on, she’d buy herself a sugar mouse every week. It wasn’t something she could explain, but it was important somehow. Something simple she could rely on. There would always be a sugar mouse on a Friday afternoon, no matter what else might happen.

If something good happened, it was a celebration. If something bad happened, it was something to remind her that there would always be good things left for her, even if it was as simple as some sugar and a piece of string.

“Sometimes it’s the little things that get you,” her father had said once. Looking at her weekly sugar mouse in its paper bag made her believe that. Even if it was simple, it was something. It was important.

The shopkeeper always made sure to keep one aside for her if it looked like they might run out. He always made sure it was a different colour every week, and she was always grateful for that, even though they both knew that she liked the white ones best.

“It’s not as though they taste any different,” she’d say. “But the white ones are best, I think. Sugar’s meant to be that colour.”

The shop closed the day before her eighteenth birthday.

The last day was a Thursday, so she had to get her last sugar mouse a day early. It was an unsettling break in her simple routine, but it seemed fitting somehow. The shopkeeper didn’t seem surprised. He simply slid a sugar mouse into a paper bag and twisted it closed like he always did.

“I saved a white one for you; I know how much you like them.” She managed to smile for him.

“I suppose I’ll have to find something else to be my reminder of all the good things. I’ve been relying on my sugar mice all this time; it’ll be hard to find something to match that.”

“Maybe you should try making them yourself,” the shopkeeper said.

She took her sugar mouse out of its bag and looked at it for a moment.

“Do you think I could?”

“I think you could do anything you set your mind to, and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who’s given sugar mice twelve years of attention.”

She left the shop with her white sugar mouse, and a bag containing a recipe and some moulding tins.

After she finished the mouse, she tied the string around her pinkie finger, and wore it for the rest of the day. Just because.