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It was fascinating how much of reality the brain could bottle. It'd be perfect if I could control the things it kept, and the things it casted to oblivion.
I dreamt of Salome Durham the way she was just three days ago, bright and blushing. She stood at the hill that overlooked Oxwich Bay, where she and Francis Belby liked to picnic. The wind was brisk, and her cerise skirt encircled her like a downturned rose.
On the ground sat a rattan basket filled with water-slick grapes and oranges. She peeled her grapes – she didn't like how "friction-ey" the skin felt, she told me.
"Lucky you got to do your own surgery after all, hm? Did that count?" she said. She looked back and smiled one of her cherry-lipped smiles. Popping a naked grape in her mouth, she laughed – "I'm just kidding. Keep healing people, Mary. It's okay."
She would say something like that, downplay everything I did wrong. I wish she'd been more vengeful. Whips and chains, a boiling-hot acid bath, maybe an awl lodged through the cranium. Anything would've been more welcome than that nonchalant saintliness of hers. It hurt to receive when I wronged her in the minutest ways, it hurt a billion times more the days after I ended her life.
In the dreams I would have, I couldn't say a word of apology, nor move an inch to kiss her feet. Perhaps that was the real torture. Night after night, I could only watch as beautiful Salome Durham vanished into light, which dimmed and dimmed and died.
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Bronwyn woke me up for breakfast the next day –rocked me awake quite violently, opened the curtain and let a stream of dusty sunray smack-dab into my eyes.
She was already dressed in picnic attire, a gingham pinafore and a straw hat. I was ashamed to hear that she tried to wake me up five times before she finally did, though she seemed to take it in good humour. I was lucky she was kind. I'd lock myself in until I died if she gossiped to the others.
I apologized repeatedly and said that I'd be there in ten minutes.
Now lit by morning light, the bedroom was quite sweet – something out of a dollhouse.
Flowery motifs abounded on the vanity table, on the bedspread, on all four compartment doors of the wardrobe. The ceiling was a half-finished, amateurish fresco of interweaving clouds and lilies, tapering to plain white where the artist apparently gave up. It had all too lovable quirks. Blooms of leakage browned the wallpaper; the lace-trimmed inner curtain fluttered, moth-eaten and utterly useless at blocking out the wan light.
