Nocturne

A father and his daughter were sitting on the precipice of somewhere unknown, foreign even to the milky sky whose low clouds hovered on by. She was sitting, bracing her knees together with her soft, nervous arms, her shivering only illuminated by the light of the moon and the stars, the stars that seemed so close to the girl who at that moment would never have believed her absent mother's voice even had it rang out through the dark night, telling her "THEY'RE GONE, THEY'RE FAR AWAY, NO ONE'S THERE TO PROTECT YOU NOW"...

She had just been startled awake from a nightmare that shook her to her spine, so much that it really did do that even though at that age the girl shouldn't even know what a spine is or be aware of its existence... shouldn't be aware of the very delicacy of the network upholding her very life. She felt the charge, however, and sprang awake.

She awoke to the universe of another dream.

She sat around. She shivered, then stopped. Then she thought about how alone she was, and she shivered again. The stars seemed to falter for a second, and at that moment she called out with a voice that she herself didn't hear, "I NEVER MEANT THE FAULT." It was something childish, and yet there was something of a certain maturity in there. The maturity that only dreams can teach to young kids.

But she didn't know what she herself had said, or meant. Or was it "meanted"? She puzzled over that question for a second, thinking to herself that thinking about "past participates" and other "grammars" she'd learned at school would awaken her rational mind and ease her out of her dream, yes! she knew she was in a dream, but she almost got there, and she didn't. She sat down, took a deep breath, took a short breath and almost cried, upset enough for her entire mouth to turn into saliva that she let slip out of her mouth before she eventually spat it all out, an action which made her cry. Grammar and English language rules tossed aside, she was still young after all.

The sky turned navy blue. It was navy black before. She knew the sun was rising, and that she had to get out, or she would never be allowed to wake up in the real world again, the real world. But what was that real world? Where was the key that allowed her to get back into it? She didn't know. Finally she turned to her father, who had been there the whole time, but never active until she reacknowledged his existence, and said:

"Daddy - " she sobbed, " - why am I stuck in a dream? I just dreamed!"

"Julianne, it's because sometimes we need to go into a fantasy world. We need - " even he hesitated, " - to work out our problems in the real one."

"And why are you here?" she said. And before she could demand why he wouldn't let her out, he opened his mouth wide to breathe in deeply and say:

"Because we need other people - friends, cousins, family - to come with us on these journeys to the other world. Otherwise we might get stuck here forever, alone, every single one of us, alone."

A pause. Then one of them spoke:

"But we're not."