Fragment

AUGUST 23

She sat in the blue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.

An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet-Saturday morning cartoon cliches in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless sprawl.

Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky. Just as it always did.

Nell screamed, soundlessly-the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…

Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.

Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.

She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.

So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.

Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.

Today, on Henders Island, she would find a new flower-and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.

And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too- by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.