ana_pavlova @ 2002-11-15T07:36:00

2002-11-15T15:43:00Z

I.
a girl, all lush lips, love-me-daddy gloss smeared across them
a girl dancing, dancing, stomping, whirling, crashing, shuddering
she slammed into a wall as the song ended, sweating it's dark angst across the dance floor. the wall felt soft and yeilding to her drug-hazed skin, though fellow dancers could hear her skull thud dully against it's concrete surface. over the dying music it sounded like a lone drum beat, drifting from over the hills in some painting of a prairie. natives would start beating the drums louder, louder, a war beginning.
but there was no continuing drum beat. one jolt to the brain was enough for the girl, who stumbled, confused that the jello-like wall had caused her pain.
slumping to the floor, her petticoats and lacy skirts fluffed about her, she stared at the pretty lights.
the world was neon and she felt free.
for another hour the girl watched the lights, and the half-naked beauties and horrors of the city's street-kid population spin and jam. her heartblood colored ringlets fell sweaty and greasy in her face. her eyelashes stuck together, mascara and perspiration blurring around her eyes and shadowing the lids.
she began to crave another un-reality. one not so dirty.
the girl pulled herself up on a table, oriented herself to the world of standing upright once again, and tottered off in her 6 inch high platforms.
the night sky whispered deadly secrets in her hallucinating ears as she made her way home. several times an alley way offered easy release and rest to her tired bones, but she held fast to an image in her mind. one which kept her from lying in some comfortable pile of trash and taking the rest of her stash then and there.
a clawfoot bathtub in a white room. windows foggy, barely obscuring a purple sky. herself in the bathtub, the white porcelain tub, an dreamset on her head. jacked into the garden shrine. another world. a clean world.
she made it home somehow. home had an oval-shaped door way, like walking into a cut out of a giant egg. the rooms were white, white, eggshell white. obscure japanese-influenced lamps, twisted and bonsai-ed, turned her tea room into a maze of light.
the tea room was more of an opium den. long couches, white with fine red swirls, lay stretched across the room next to antique mahogany end-tables. on the tables were all manner of tea cups, and there the girl kept her stashes. white powers, yellow and black pills, pink paper tabs, dried green herbs and thick sticky packets of resin. in a sugar-cube dish were pink sugar cubes soaked with acid.
the girl wandered through her home, still drug hazed. she hardly remembered which addictive confection she'd laid upon her tongue that night, but she knew it gave her wanderlust.
tonight she'd be safer wandering inside her own brain. poor cracked and bruised skull, it was throbbing. she imagined a thin network of purple bruise-veins, pumping as her head throbbed. the drug made the vision too clear and she opened her eyes, unaware she'd ever closed them. glitter from her eyelids fell into her eye and she rubbed at them.
time for a bath.
the dreamset was a lovely pearlecent affair, fitting around the girl's head like a seashell around a hermit crab. it's whorled surface pulsed with tiny glittering lights. it required no plug-in. it fed off of brainwaves, and spit them back out into the user's head, a distorted vision of their original thoughts.
after filling her clawfoot tub with sweet pink water and settling into it, the girl slipped the dreamset on.it went on over her dirty hair and covered her ears. she pulled the eyefilm down. it was a thin, almost condom-like sheet of white, latex-y stuff. the girl reached down next to her to a small blue bottle of eyelube. she rubbed some of the painless, slick stuff over her closed eyelids, allowing some of it to seep through her lashes and coat her eyes. next she covered the inside of the eyefilm with the same stuff.
she opened her eyes wide, and pressed the eyefilm directly against her eyeballs. it adhered easily, but it was slick and she was able to move her eyes. it was like rolling your eyes around underneath closed lids.
she touched the soft smooth surface of the dreamset , right above her left ear. a raised spiral was there, and she traced her finger from the outside to the inside. as if she was turning up volume on a stereo, reality slowly faded out and a blue tinge colored her field of latex-clad vision.
her world took shape as the condom-thin film covering her retinas lit up. greenery and loveliness swept past her irises, sinking it's flower-scented teeth into the contents of her skull. the dream began.
II.

silence, ringing, ringing, like the insistent screams of a telephone. ears burning, the girl opened her eyes.
the club had filled up while she was unconcious. from her position on the floor she saw the sky - the ceiling - light up. little fires lit themselves on stage and out stepped a young man. his red hair was dyed the same color as the girl's own chemically-altered curls. he looked shy and she could imagine his insides curling and crying with stage fright. then the music started. the club began boiling with young rockers, slamming, headbanging. the notes of music fell like scattered leaves, mingling with the crowd. the shy looking man had turned into darkness incarnate, crawling across the stage screaming as the music played on.
the girl closed her eyes again.
my friend, my friend. i miss you. starlight on your tongue as you told me stories. made it all fall away,the four walls, the medication, the hurt. my friend, the hurt. i miss you. i ache for you, like hunger pricking me with knife points of starvation. they took you away and i can't find you, i can't find you. in this darkness, the city, the absolute pitch BLACK of the neon lights, the moonshine, the hallucinogenic sun beating down on my back. oh god i miss you. come take me away.
the girl remembered a grey building, housing hurt dreams and adored nightmares. little girls tormented by the demons seeping into their heads were locked into washed out candy colored rooms. fed candy that messed with their minds. always the candy, the changes, the shocks, the shackles. insane little girls.
a little girl, a little peach-pale room.
her name; evora vahn. vietnamese-american, a shellshocked remnant of a sane child. the peach room was her new home. sanctuary. mama and daddy had left her there after the incident. well, several incidents. one was tainted in blood, one in paint, one in nail polish remover. always her incidents seemed to involve some kind of staining or burning substance.
why did she need to cover the walls with pictures, pictures to cover pictures? why did she need to drink harmful liquids, erasing her insides with their corrosive caresses? she imagined the nailpolish remover would bleach the stains from her soul, as she downed a whole sickly lemon-scented bottle. hours stretched into a day of vomiting in the ER. this was how she spent her 10th birthday.
but where had the shell-shock come from? her parents dimly remembered their ancestor's last war, stories handed down from grandparents. the world had been at relative peace for decades.
the soul of the earth burned and sighed, reaching tentacles out to it's inhabitants. wrapped around evora's throat, she felt it tighten. hurt, hurt. and she did - herself.
but not alone. evora hadn't been alone in that place and now she was and she couldn't stop the shaking from rocking her frame. her bony shoulders stabbed out from her sleeves as she wrapped her arms around herself, remembering, remembering like gasoline poured and lit.
she realized the music had stopped again. her eyes opened, sticky eyelashes seperating themselves slowly. she could almost hear them coming free, pop, pop.
on stage the singer had ceased writhing and moaning. his backups adjusted their instruments as he adjusted his entire demeanor. the stage act fell away once more, like sunburned skin peeled off in a desperate wish to be free of the clinging, dead stuff. his hair lay lank and sweaty in his face. evora saw he had red crecent tattoos under his startling blue-white eyes.
strains of classical guitar floated across the audience. the black-clad masses turned their attention back to the stage, as it had naturally wandered after the rocking and screaming on stage had ceased. the classical notes of a real, non digital instrument was as foreign to the club as the previous music would be in an opera house. the singer stood in the single light now gracing the room. his voice stretched across the void, it felt to evo, just for her. the sound was scratchy and hoarse from the hour (hours?) of howling his songs at the audience.

"when i find myself in times of trouble
mother mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom
let it be..."
another time, another place, the song would have been greeted with thunderous applause and screams of adoration. now, it was so unknown it was completely ignored. the audience realized it was going to be a slow song and turned to each other to talk for a bit.
evo, however, felt an unfamilier lump rise to her throat. it hurt, trying to swallow it, so she gave up and waited for the touched-by-music-tears to come. they didn't. the lump was an aching presence, entirely it's own. she realized her arms were still wrapped about herself and she rocked back and forth. the druugs which had helped her slip from awareness entirely were wearing off. reality was coming back, as painful as memories of the mental hospital.
on stage, the singer was standing, his shoulders hunched over the microphone. as if he felt the same lump as evo, his voice broke as he sang.
"and though the night is cloudy
there is still a light that shines on me
shine until tomorrow let it be
i wake up to the sound of music
mother mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom
let it be..."
the music tapered off and he was left standing alone on stage as his musicians put their instruments away and walked off stage. a few members of the audience who had been moved applauded a bit. the singer smiled brokenly at them and also made his way off stage.
evo realized she was crying. after minutes of her face buried in her thin arms, she felt eyes on her. the singer was kneeling before her, looking as boyish and shy as ever. without thinking she fell against him, hugging him, trying to thank him.
"that song...it hurts." she whispered. he hugged her back and nodded. hope in this place was as painful as a needle being extracted from a vein, unemptied.
in evo's home, they lay together in bed, clothed and unmoving.
"i'm gay," he said.
"so am i," she answered.
truth soothed any tension between them, and they fell asleep curled together like children.

III
he told her his name was suatre. she showed him her dream machine.
the garden shrine was a place of wonder. gingersnaps snapped as you stepped, the ground crunching, the hills boiling with leaves and trees and pure beauty myth as far as far was. the digital forest-scape sucked them in. hard eyes softened on the mystical blue sky - blue like they'd never seen for real in the smog coughing city. the cloud ran races, circled, spiraled, dizzied. they fell together into the grass and it was as real as love.
evo and suatre ran together, hand in tattooed hand, down hills and up them, falling into streams full of rainbow fishes and stones like diamonds. the trees moved to their will. an endless hallucination upon them, they stumbled into a clearing in the woods. like stonehenge, a roman colluseum, a place of empty magesty. the clearing held one giant boulder, a little off center. the red headed vocalist decided they should climb it, and they did.
the world around them turned to an oozing river of confection. they sat upon the rock as it shimmered beneath them, colors seeping up into their limbs. evo felt a giggle rise in her throat, and it flew away in the form of a green and yellow little bird. suatre held up his hands, full of the flood, and saw worlds and ink-things swim in them.
after a very short time, the world was too much. their teeth hurt and though they despaired to return to reality, the sweetness of the land was too surreal and far too endless for this one trip. they unplugged and sat panting slightly in the bathtub.
"what _was_ that?" suatre asked, ice-eyes so dazzled that fire dripped from them.
"my garden shrine," evo said.
***
the dreamset was all the rage among glassy children who needed an escape. when evo had purchased hers, the man told her just to put it on and think of something. the world that took shape would be her own but she would hardly recognize it. he said to start small, imagine a person. the feelings associated with them would create the universe and she would fly though it on wings of her own making.
she had taken it home, dosed herself, slipped it on, and thought of oisa.
oisa from the institution. oisa who'd taken her small and unstable hand and led her out into the courtyard at the center of midnight. there they thought they saw stars floating in the ocean of the sky, flickering between groggy clouds. they learned and forgot and were born and reborn there at the institution. at age 15, evora cut a wound in her palm and pressed it to a bloody twin in oisa's. sisters forever, they swore endlessly, in their bunks, in the attack, mentally to each other in group therapy. aracane notes in their own private passed back and forth, though friendships had no need to be secret. they felt the need anyway.
what they had was something more. an instant recognition when their eyes had first met - they knew.
a pale little girl, long blue-black hair weighing her down. she sat with her hands folded on the black velvet of her lace-dripping dress. evo, in instituion blues, stopped and stared. on her way to the bathroom she'd passed the waiting room and there oisa was, waiting. the head nurse soon came out and led the pale girl away, but evo couldn't stop watching her as she was led down the hall.

i know you.
so she thought of the pale girl-child, her best friend, her one love. evo had sat in the bathtub, dreamset cradling her skull, and thought of oisa.
the garden shrinbe was born singing and screaming from her mind, overtaking her senses in such a rush evo had grasped the sides of the tub to keep from drowning. the forest, hardly a garden, over run with so much mystery and mysticism, was something she hadn't exptected. from what she'd heard, dreamsets put you into colorful happy places, floating along and catching site of a random monkey or something. this, this, this. this was new. this was special. evo knew it was oisa leading her down the path. the path to their secret world they'd whispered of in the institution. they knew it was out there. they just had to find it.
oisa had been taken away from the institution a month before evo was to be released. evo, almost 18, almost an adult, was going to be free. intricate plans to take her best friend with her, break her out and steal her away, were made.
one night, they came in, drugged oisa, and carried her away. evo slept through it, and slashed her wrists the next morning.
she spent the last month in solitary, arms bandaged, throat hoarse from screaming. she asked why. she cried. they told her oisa's parents had requested she be moved to another location, as they themselves were moving. they wouldn't tell evo where.
when they could no longer legally keep her, they set her loose, to kill herself or others if she so desired. evo stepped out into the dim light of day and felt the world burn.
i'll find you, she swore, crossing her heart and hoping to die.
the only clue she could hold onto, now, a year later, was her dreamset, and in it, the garden shrine.

there was a man named cleo who could help her, suatre said. he was the one with the baby face and crazy eyes. he hung out at the club where suatre sung.
the night evo went to find cleo, suatre was sitting in a corner of the dusty, smoky club with another man. the asian-faced exotic was clearly the apple of both suatre's eyes.
evo slammed through the music, cutting shadows into the lightshow. shimmers caught in her curls and she did her best to shake them off. with a head-snap back and forth, she resembled a dog tearing a bite of flesh from it's meal. to the beat she jerked and stomped, losing herself. lost amid the swirl of sound and bodies, a black patch of anarchy in the steady up-and-down movement of the moshers and general commoners.
like the queen of hearts that she was, she kissed girls as she passed, lips, foreheads, hands. never stopping to learn their faces, she left them bits of her affection...extra affection overflowing her heart, as the one it was meant for was currently missing. the love had to go someone, and if she didn't bestow it upon strangers, the pomogranite pit in her chest would begin to seize, beating too fast.
a lace-clad hand covered her breast, feeling the wild flapping, the wings of her heart. she had too much energy this night, as a latex-clad snake-boy slithered about on stage, moaning. the beat so loud, her teeth hurt. wild, too hyped, she was alice searching for the scary rabbit. alice had taken too many pills before hand, her eyes jumped and twisted and the room melted and her world slid down the throats of the men at the bar, drinking, drinking...
she found herself in the ladies room, pink light bathing her hair and washing her face like a good mommy. suatre shook her and she opened her eyes.
'i found him,' he told her.
as she was led to the trenchcoated mystery man, evora wondered what her dream girl was dreaming.
cleo's skin was parchment pale and his eyes sunken deep into his skull. he looked babyfaced, maybe. a dead baby. his irises had something...eyeskins or contacts...that turned them white. his hair sprouted from the top of his skull like a plant, wild and poisonous. it was the color of an oil spill.
he grinned dirty teeth at her and evo smelled death on him.
'how can you help me?' evo tried to sound tough but her voice was full of white powder and candy pills.
his shark grin stretched out at her, threatening. 'got my connections. need someone found? i can find.'
she followed him home like a dog on a leash, bound by hope and trailing behind with fear. his boots were the biggest she'd ever seen, studded black leather with metal and sharps. she kept her eyes focused on the stairs as they climbed them, up up up, to apartment number 217.
inside was a hurricane of delight. blue and red lights sparked and guttered like candles. the living room held a gigantic bed, it's frame ancient carved wood and it's blankets and spreads maroon and stained. black spatters covered the walls, as if a mad artist had been imprisioned here.
the most beautiful creature in the world was sprawled on the bed. evo couldn't discern it's gender.
'this is rapunzel,' cleo said, bowing to the lovely being and kissing it's pearly foot. the toenails were bright jewels painted peach. evo nodded distractedly as the man-or-woman-or-both ran a hand through it's long black hair. it smiled wickedly back to evo, fangs hissing in the electric lights.
cleo fetched a black headset, nothing like the angelic dream machine evo owned. it looked like a bear trap and she didn't know if she could put her head into it.
'i don't need a headset. i have one.' she scowled.
'not like this one.' the man grinned again.
he explained. dream machines, headsets, whichever you called them, were a singular affair. your dreams were yours and yours only, or maybe a friend's or lovers if you had a hook up. but this headset, he said, could hook into all dreams. all machines. all over the world.
'basically, precious, if your honey is dreaming, you can find her,' the beauty on the bed commented.
evora's hands shook as cleo placed the set over her hair. she knew this machine, which should never have existed, was highly illegal. nothing like this had existed since the ban of the 'net decades back.
but to find oisa was all she knew or cared to know.
he flicked the switch. the universe exploded.
********
'so, what do you think?' cleo asked, watching the girl sitting on the floor. her mouth was hanging open and she was dead to the world, lost in the cosmos of thought.
'what do i think?' the creature slinked around cleo, running a hand across the man's shoulder. 'i think she's darling. can we eat her?'
cleo flicked the tip of his long tongue between his filed-point teeth. 'i think so. i should imagine no one is going to look for her...not this one.' he slipped forward and knelt before evo. he took a long curl in his fingers and played with it.
'she's dirty,' rapunzel pouted. 'i don't want filth on your lips.'
'i'll wash her, of course,' cleo said, tossing a look to his lover. 'but isn't she sublime?'
'she's so lost...poor lamb.' rapunzel glided off the bed and curled about cleo on the floor, picking up evo's slack wrist. it wiped her skin on it's silky robe, then licked the pale flesh over her pulsing vein.
a dream like no other.
a dream like all the screams of babies on dark nights.
a dream like dying.
evo died.
the abyss sucked her down, her screams shattering against unseen walls. the world of the dreamers filled her eyes, sunk into her brain like worms, devoured her spirit. ate her conciousness.
she was reborn.
the world shifted once, twice. she found herself on an angled plane, an expanse of reality as far as sight. unlike any dream she'd ever experienced in her dreamset, this was all. it was everything, everyone's. she took a step, and dreams melted into her. someone - a young boy - was dream-playing an adventure game. he was a large creature, muscles bulging as he tore his enemies to thin strips of flesh. another step and evo was in an older man's dream of lust and bondage, his secretary tied to a chair as a savage dog licked her tender parts. shuddering, she moved on, unnoticed, a ghost in the machine.
a teenage girl dreamed of swimming, breathing, flapping a mermaid's tail, underwater. the ocean was all the colors of a rainbow, the texture of the liquid like some kind of alien teardrop. evo floated beside the blonde maiden for a while, but remembered her search for her lost friend. slipping from the girl's dream into another, and another, and another, she called wordlessly, aimlessly. oisa, oisa, oisa. please.
she had no idea how many minutes, hours, weeks had passed as she traversed the maze of minds. she had felt a thread, a faint almost-nothing intuition that felt like oisa. she followed it.
an explosion rocked her and she fell backwards as a shining being stepped foreward.
'evo, wake up. evo, wake up!' it said. in oisa's voice, her smoky and accent-tinged voice. evo felt her heart stop, then felt sharp, random pain in the phantom of her body, left behind in reality.
'WAKE UP'
her hand snapped up and jerked the set from her head. realizing suddenly only one hand had risen to the task. realizing that her left hand lay in cleo's hand. cleo, sitting back several feet from her, chewing on her numb fingers. numb, as they were no longer attached to her body.
horrified, she looked down to her wrist and saw the sexless creature named rapunzel licking her bleeding stump. its pale, perfect face was smeared red. shrieking, evo scooted back, and somehow stood on bloodless legs. crazily gleaming, the pair's eyes raked her body. they were split seconds from deciding when and how to tackle her. evo backed away. her remaining hand fumbled with the doorknob she suddenly felt pressing into her back.
'oh, great!' she heard cleo growl as she bolted from the apartment.
she almost fell down the stairs but somehow managed to make it to the street. thudding bootsteps shouted behind her but she ran through the street, panting, dizzy. screaming. a speeding car screeched to a halt and suatre's amazed face appeared from the window. about to toss off some smartass remark, his jaw fell open and he quickly opened the door and pulled the bleeding, fainting girl into the vehicle.
************

evo examined her new hand.
it was silvery metal, matching the glazed-pearl of her dream machine. she'd asked for it specifically as she lay in numb, mute shock on the operating table.
the hand would function mostly how it was supposed to. she mused that at least the lovely-mad pair had taken her left hand. she was hopelessly right handed and her left hand was something she hardly ever even used. the hand's fingers were long, longer than her real ones, and had an extra joint in each. four segments of finger instead of three. the segments attached to balljoints so they could move freely, but evora found the long, strangely doll-like fingers to be disturbing. she hid her hand away in a fold of her blood-painted white skirt.
it fluffed about her, a cloud of soft childhood, the kind of skirt evo always wore. petticoats peeked out from underneath like shy flowers. her striped tights were torn from stumbling in the streets, against pavement. hitting pavement. getting back up. running.
outside on the street, she walked warily, hunted.
at home, finally, she deadbolted her doors and herself. sleep came at once as she fell on an opium-couch, and she didn't dream.
******
wirey-violet, the lashes thick and jungled, saint's eyes. he tried to take in the land, ocean, sky, sand, the dark figures of suatre and evo running, running into the fog. he sat on the sand dune, the night sky boiling above him. it was midnight on the beach and solitude prevailed. solitude and emptiness and the two running in the sand fel tas if they were on the moon, in space, running and screaming in the thick black darkness. running towards the endless firmament horizon. the sky touched the ocean and the ocean touched the sand and all was foggy, smoky, grey. utterly surreal, they ran, and they fell in the wet sand, the water still so far off and so close, and their blind hands reached for it, and they couldn't touch the edge of nothing.
evora had long since kicked off her shoes and they had flown away like birds, heavy on their straps and the wind was nothing - the most powerful nothing, rolling her skirts down the beach, far away from where they had landed when she had peeled them off and flung them aside, running, her eyes closed, running into nothing, running enternally. until, of course, she'd fallen down, exhausted, beside suatre. suatre's skin was crystalized with salt spray, his hair stiff, eyes grey orbs in the grey night.
they leaned together, naked skin sand-coated, lay back, watched the thick soup of clouds above their heads. saint on the sand dune watched them watching. the night passed on.

in her dreams she remembered oisa. she remembered oisa’s hair ecspecially, how bright it had been against the dark night sky. her blue black hair ribbling down her back, a cascade of elegance, bleeding into the crushed velvet of her dress. oisa had taken a long lock of her hair and woven it together with one of evora’s candycane curls. this red and black striped fetish was buried in the forested area near the institution. they held their own masses in the forest, evo and oisa, stripping naked, pearlecent skin casting ghost like auras, the particles bleeding out from where their bodies should have ended. they felt one, they felt their selves were not confined to one space, and they felt blended, like the braided hair in the sacred place they made. the forest became their cathedral and there, the two insane little girls imagined they had their own world, a kingdom - queendom - to rule. they were the sleeping princesses. evora was sleeping beauty, and oisa was snow white. they imagined the two princesses woke themselves up, cast off their necopheliac boyfriends, and ran off together to create a wonderland. heaven.
so the garden shrine was born from their tangled, shining minds. the garden shrine with it’s pillars and watchtowers of trees growing up from the everlasting forest. the garden shrine was where sleeping beauty and snow white spent the rest of their days. they drank from the stream and never got parasites. they cooked wild birds and spiced them with all sorts of foul herbs from the woods that strangly tasted right with the little creature’s flesh. their castle was an empty one they’d stumbled upon, possibly once owned by beauty and her beast.
in their world, they were reincarnations of beauty and the beast. evo was of course the beast, loud, gentle, frightening, alone, brash. oisa was beauty because she was.
the castle was furnished just for them. fountains of candy and water played tricks on their eyes, striped magical curtains hung from the walls and hid the cold grey brick from their softening eyes. they needed this lovliness, this nursery to replace the one they’d burned in their brains. their insanity had a home, and it was within each other. this castle, this garden, this shrine. a shrine to their love and their madness and their mad love for each other.
in the cold forest around a tiny fire lit above the spot where their braid was buried, evo and oisa went into something of a shared trance, and imagined all this, and more.
the doctors and counselers had, at first, hoped their friendship would do something to heal each other. as the time passed and the girls withdrew into each other so much that they rarely even spoke (aloud) the doctors knew something abnormal was going on, and tried to keep them seperate. it didn’t work.
at 16, they were put in different bedrooms (as they’d requested a room together years before). it didn’t keep them from visiting each other in their dreams, where they swam in enchanted, freezing lakes, finding treaure and monsters and magic.
oisa wrapped her long warm hair around evo’s body and kept her warm.
evo had lost all contact with oisa when the girl was taken from the institution. her dreams were solitary. her world was nothing and the glass from her window was all she needed to fill the emptiness. her blood spilled as she filled herself with peace.
of course they wouldn’t let her die. in solitary, she was bound like an animal/should never be bound/ and waited, waited. rocking. rocking.
the ocean was rocking and she was at peace. suatre stroked her curls and her mechanical hand faded fast from her mind.

******
her hand curled and spasmed around the stalk of a flower, warm and tall. the garden shrine shimmered around the tiny desctruction. the colorful little life in evo’s robotic hand wilted and wept, and she felt guilt. the sky darkened and all the shadows lengthened.
drifting on a wind of memory, oisa’s voice filled evo’s ears. she’d warned her. oisa had saved her life, stretched across through the wires of the dreamscape to contact her. evo was convinced utterly.
the hours stretched on and she waited for inspiration. never had she spent so long in the garden. tentecles and roots began to creep up on her from the ground as night fell and thirteen moons rose over the virtual sky. they snuggled against evo’s legs and arms and wherever they touched she felt hunger.
her guts boiled and thrashed, and still she stayed inside.
for two days she lay in the tangles of vines, imploring the solitary dream of hers to branc out beyond her skull, to touch somene.
theb lades of grass, dancing in front of her eyes, began to grow. a hallucination insdie a hallucination, they danced, formed waves of themselves in images of their present and past position. they blurred in front of evo’s eyes, brushed her lashes, dilated her pupils. the grass became tiny women as she watched, tiny and thin and almost skeletal, bald and hollow-eyed. she beckoned briefly, and somehow the motion of her hand became something else, a sound. an entire jolt to evo’s mind as the phone rang in her apartment.

the water in her tub had gone ice cold and her body was shivering and painfully wrinkled. the eyelube had dried up and peeling the eyeshield from her face was a horrifying experience. she hardly made it to the phone.
“come see us,” the voice inside it whispered.
_
she foudn the temple easilly. it was a major source of activity in the city, almost in the center of the commotion and the ‘hip’ part of town. she passed it often on the way to the clubs, libraries and drug dealers’ places of residence.
the vosa, prophettesses, lived there, bare walls and bone colored floors. evo wa sled to a room, eggshell with faint blue tinges, like veins. the vosa sat in aa circle, pald and pale and thin. so thin evo, tiny hungry evo, felt huge and lumpy anbd lumbering next to them. their flesh constricted to the minimum. their bald heads delicately nodded to evo as she sunk to her knees in front of them. their darkly lined eyes were large, haunted, elfin.

“can you help me,” evo pleaded the lovely birdboned women. the group glanced at each other, silently speaking, their long boney fingers gesturing. one slid foreward clad like the others in a clinging see-through black sari. it glittered with dusted starlights.
‘we will ask ano to help you,’ she whispered.
a few moments crept by as the vosa communed silently with their goddess. the woman who’d spoken did so again.
‘you search for your friend,’ she said. ‘we sensed it, and you, across the voids. we were searching for others in the silent dreams of the masses. you shone, you stood out. so we called you. ano called you. you must fast for three days. drink water. at the end of three days we will consult the oracle.’

alone in the room the vosa provided fir her, evo paced. three days. she hadn’t eaten for two already. would she die? she found herself comfortable with the thought. however, after several hours she realized that starvation would be a horrible way to die. she raged inside the room the next day, trying to break down the mirrored door. the whole room was a mirror, and evo stripped off her clothes after the second day, and lay staring at herself in the ceiling. half-remembered tattoos on her body, scars, the metal hand. she gazed and the mirrors felt like a funhouse illusion, gaping her belly, stretching her thighs, until the images of her own ugliness and obesity were so much that evo took her shoes and smashed the lights.
in the total darkness she was alone with the reality of her collarbones.

they dragged her out on the last day and propped her up in the oracle room. she was given a thick black liquid to drink and she did, feeling it coat her insides like tar. she vomited suddenly, across the floor. one of the vosa crouched over the splashes and markings the vomit had made. the others cleaned evo and they wrapped her body in a black sari as well.

from out of the hunger and pain and madness, evo heard the vosa in her mind. they said
your friend
the starlight girl, the one you miss
she is not here on earth
her soul is in heaven
but her body lives
find the body
then find the soul.

evo stumbled out into the night.
-------
they’d been saving their pills. because they were SUCH good little girls, no one watched for the telltale swallow any more. so they barred their throats and saved the little chunks of drug, the globes of decadent sleep. in a tear in their mattresses, they saved up twenty each, their round, pink and white secrets waiting to be used. one night they slipped away to the nearbby forest to start their dream.
they knew there was something else out there. somewhere else, a heaven for them only. the fourth world, the musical sphere, the garden shrine. their shrine.
if it was beyond their bodies, then so be it.
in art therapy, the girls painted leafy mazes, castles, old and roving mazes, wind in the grass, strange nests empty of birds.
in the small forest by the institution, they tried to reach their garden shrine.
they swallowed all their pills, and leaned against each other. waiting for a vision, a teleportation, death. they didn't speak the fact out lous, that they would die. somehow they knew it was the only way to reach what they wanted, their shared dream, hallucination.
walking the firmament of the dark, they heard something god like calling them. the glimpse was of heaven when they looked toward the voice.
they were called again, but back to life, by tubes and stomach pumps and adrenaline injections.
in their hidden thoughts, as each were confined to solitary, their prayers, their dreams, they swore they would return to the summerland, together.
the sickly twisted, beautiful world in their minds.
they were allowed to room together again, (mainly because of a lack of space in the hospital) and they hung their paintings on the bare walls and pretended they were windows. they imagined they were in a locked tower in the center of the garden shrine. captive in the heaven they wished to enter, and unable to. like their unescapable bodies.
in front of these windows they pronounced themselves married, body mind and soul, and they kissed, and evo cut her palm, and then oisa's, and they sealed their union. sisters in blood and madness and dreams. they were 15.

when she was released from the hospital -alone-, evo went to live in a homeless youth home in the pit, part of the city where it seemed on homeless youths lived. her sad searches for oisa were fruitless, and knowing how truly hopeless it would be without resources or money to conduct a proffesioanl search, she basically gave up. she drowned in drugs, and then one day her parents died and left her everything.
her artistically shaped haven-home was her first purchase, the bathtub the second, and the dreamset the third. a large, spendid black and blue and grey tattoo of a shadowy woman on her back was her fourth purchase. the tattoo sometimes felt warm and heavy at night, and evo imagined oisa pressed against her back in sleep.

she read the word 'soulmate' once in a library book, and burst into tears.
-

suatre had begged saint to help evo in her search. though suatre and evo still barely knew each other, suatre felt a kinship and love towards his almost-stranger friend that he didn't understand.
they shared a longing for a beautiful life, a sad hope, and an innocent part of their minds that still hid from the drugs they pumped into themselves.

waving to evo from the car, he and saint sped off to another city to do some hacking. evo waved back, closed her eyes, and willed the great computerverse to open it's information to the boys. evo stayed in the pit on a mission of her own.

-
she backtracked a bloody trail to cleo's apartment where she'd had her glimpse of oisa. she had no plan, but she knew she had to get ahold of the headset, the black boxy machine that connected her to the world.
she opened the door with her robotic hand, surprised to find it unlocked.
the apartment smelled like rank death and unwashed tears. the neon lights were broken and the only light source came dimly from the bathroom down the hall. evo almost screamed when she stumbled over the half-eaten, naked, headless corpse of a man. it lay near the bed which was thick and rotting with blood. on the floor was a gaping, awful maw of a flower.
it's petals were dark and meaty and was the source of a smell worse than the decomposing body. evo did not let her horror stop her from searching for the headset. she wasted no time pawing through old silk, come-stained sheets, going through drawers. nothing but pornography, bones, fetishes, bottles of liquid, jewelry. the filthy apartment felt like it was closing in on her head.
something caught her hair, pulled her around, slapped her face. a pale, blood-flecked hand. she fell against a mannequin in a kimono, and looked up to face a snarling rapunzel. the beautiful, wild thing was as naked as the corpse on the floor, and evo saw that he was male. he came at her, long wicked hair reminding her fleetingly of oisa before his taloned hands reached for her throat.
she rolled to the side and kicked at him as hard as she could with her platforms. she caught rapunzel in the side and he fell against the bed. evo scowled at the pretty man even as he glared back.
'you ate my hand!' evo screamed, anger and exileration punctuating her adrenaline rush. she felt as though her curls were crackling and raising about her, like a stormcloud.
'you killed cleo!' the mad creature screamed back, mascara tears running down his dirty face.
oisa paused and shook her head. 'you're crazy. i did not.'
rapunzel sniffed and sat up. 'yes you did. you did something to that dreamset, you nasty thing. it killed him! my cleo!' rapunzel launched himself at evo and punned her to the floor in a blurry, lightning fast move. hissing in her face, rapunzel smelled like an alchoholic, chocolate snake.
'he put the headset on, and when i woke up it'd turned into _that_!' rapunzel jerked his head towards the ghastly flower on the floor by the body. 'it...i woke up and took it off his head and it had sucked out his brain! his head was hollow. he died in that fucking flower! how did you do it?!'
evo kneed the naked man in his peirced crotch and scrambled away. 'i don't know what the fuck you're babbling about. and who's the body, freak?'
'cleo,' rapunzel sobbed, clutched into a ball. his spine showed through his back with frightening prominence. 'i had...to dispose of him...but i'm too full...for another bite.'
repulsed, evo picked up the thorny, scab-colored flower. she could see it would still fit over her head. but...
'... but first a bunch of commercials. i’m roxi, boy blue, hoping strippers inherit the earth...' the words floated in on the radio from the bathroom, and rapunzel's eyes flickered briefly. evo kicked at him to get his attention.
'it ate his brain?' she asked, eyeing the flexing teeth inside the flower. rapunzel didn't answer. 'where's the hookup?' rapunzel shrugged and pointed to a long vine connecting the flower to the wall jack.

inspired, she jammed the flower down over her hair and head, leaving the eyeshield off and the volume up. she listened and watched rapunzel for any movement.
the dreams of the world melted into her head like butter, forming a song she'd heard while unconcious on the operating table. every secret whisper seperated into atoms of sound and she floated righht through them. she felt, vauguly, her robotic hand waving to the slow beat. a ripple passed through her body and she heard
'save your pills, evo. we'll find the shrine, i know we will.'
oisa's voice, the speaker unseen again, and evo's back felt as though it was sprouting wings. warmth bled down her bakc. she realized her eyes had closed, and she forced them open. rapunzel was no longer in her field of vision. she ripped the flower from her head and felt a deep pain between her shoulderblades. rapunzel had shocked her with something, she knew, as the electricity crackled through her bones. she turned to see murder in rapunzel's eyes, her own foggy with pain.
anger flooded her at this second intrusion on her body while in the dreamset, and she shrieked, jamming the flower on top of rapunzel's head. as she sunk to her knees, she watched the man tear at the plant, but it began to grow almost instantly. vines snaked around his neck and loud sucking sounds issued from deep within rapunzel's skull.
evo felt movements on her robotic hand. she saw her hand writhing, the metalic fingers and ball joints morphing into plants, vines, flowers. a large rose bloomed in her hand and in it's open petals sat a small pink and white pill. the flora growing from her pearly hand dried up and fell away, leaving the pill, heavy as gold, in her palm. she heard the phantom in her mind again.
'save your pills. meet me in the garden.'
she left the apartment, the corpses of the mad lovers on the floor. she also left the flowerset, as it would not come free of rapunzel's head.
after she was away, it dried and rotted free of rapunzel's face, leaving a bare white skull in a silent scream.
---
saint and suatre returned with news. evo read their body language before they told her anything, and she was crying before they opened their mouths.
suatre rocked her while saint explained in quiet, detached tones, what they'd found.
oisa, taken from the institute at age 17, had been put in a stricter asylum following several suicide attempts and reports of hearing voices. electroshock, medication and therapy didn't help her. evo felt her heart cringe as she thought of the electroshock causing oisa's hair to fall out, as she thought of oisa's skin pulling tight, oisa's arms and legs strapped down to a table.
oisa talked repeatedly of missing her 'other half.'
a new form of therapy came along, and it was tried on the young woman. the headset, the dream machine, was utilized to help oisa freely explore herself.
then one day, oisa failed to return to herself. when the machine was turned off and disconnected, oisa remained comatose. her body immidiately stopped functioning automatically, and life support had to be set up quickly. however, that night, an unexplained power failure caused the life support to go off for several hours. oisa died long before the power was restored.

'she left me,' evo wailed, her voice muffled by suatre's black shirt.
the night fell. evo lay on her opium couch, listening to the ticks of the antique clock, the creaks of the floorboards, the clatter of the monorail outside her window.

.............................................................
i'm with you
i'm here, right with you
i'm coming
i can feel how the night is rushing towards me. i can feel the darkness covering me like a blanlket, like your whole body. i remember, i remember, i know.
the night won't keep me. i will find your mind and we will touch and the world will be the jeweled terrific we always imagined. so far, so far, so far.
i'm with you
i'm hiding in this cave, the ocean singing to me from behind me. the sky's lightening, remember the sky? remember the soft carress of water in your dreams? remember the dawn before the dew, before we woke, before we remembered what day and time and year it was, bvefore we realized...it was the real world.
the garden shrine. it's so beautiful and i'm here with you
oisa
oisa i'm coming
i'll be there, i'm coming
i swallowed the pill. pink and white and pinka nd white and pink and white, tumbling through my body, the pill stronger than any sound ever blasted into my ears, larger than any rape i'd felt, harder than the smooth moon.
the pill from my body which is your body which ios out body whcih never ended when you eneded which will never end, y ou and i, you and i, we found what we were looking for, oisa.
the pill throws me out of my body, the pill from the flower. i touch the
world
and
it touches me back
the spheres find my eyes, i close them and you're there, oisa.
'finally.'
you kiss me, and i kiss you back, and we look down at my body, waiting for something, on the beach, in the cove. in the cave. my body's hand clenches once, then rusts, disintergrates. it's gone and so am i.
the shrine's sun falls warm on our faces. the sky is livid with love and death. the trees sweeten our eyes.
whether it is the blackness of space or the last dream of death, or the endless hallucination, or the summerland afterlife, i don't care. we've found it, our heaven. our one, our eternal, our holy.

holy the hideous human angels

ana_pavlova @ 2002-11-15T07:36:00

sorry for the crosspost, everyone