The scent of rosehips drifted across the room from a small dish on the dresser to Kaitlyn’s cherry-tipped nose. It was sharp on the cool air; she inhaled deeper, succumbing to the emotion-memory the smell triggered. It reminded her of a time when the house was warmer, and people actually talked to one another within its walls instead of yelling through them. As punctuation to her thoughts, her mother made the final bellow at the close of some pointless, alcohol-induced argument with her timid father, who barely had a moment to sputter out a response before her mother stormed into another room. Kaitlyn sighed deeply, happy for a few moments of brooding silence. She hummed a maudlin tune as her hands danced on the air. Her small movements were languid, as if swimming through a house of thick air, heavy with vindictiveness. When she looked down at the carpet she was almost certain she could see the claustrophobic sentiments gathering there in a putrid, half-visible mist. She spun around to look at herself in the mirror. She at least looked seventeen, whether or not she felt like it. Seventeen, and still trapped in a tiny room in a house in suburbia. It was her willing cage; if she left the house, it either begot arguments about coming in two minutes past curfew, or began a diatribe on how she hung out with all the wrong sorts of people. If she dared wander into other parts of the house she was sure to stumble into an argument-in-waiting, her mother’s body prone on the floor, or her gloomy father sitting inches away from a computer screen. Thus she chose the safe confines of her room and the comforting familiarity of her volatile teenage mind. Her face hung low and heavy in the mirror, so she turned her nose upward, practicing a haughty glare that brought out her best features. “Not today, not tomorrow, but someday,” she breathed at barely a whisper. The glass fogged up, making her mouth disappear. She rolled out of her chair, jumping just as she heard something glass smash in the other room. She paused a moment, standing statuesque in the middle of the room, trying to decide whether or not to investigate the source. Her eyes felt up the room as she tried to imagine what might be going on with her mother at that moment. She finally settled upon the corner of her bedside table where a book about out of body experiences lay. In a sudden state of decision she flung herself onto the bed, grabbed the book, and opened it to the place she had left off.
“One… Two… Three… Four…” she mentally muttered, kicking up her back legs as they began to float out of her body. “Oh, c’mon already, let go.” With a firm shove, she levitated out of her body in a twisted upside-down pose. She looked down at the bed and squinted, trying to make out the shape of her figure under the covers; she couldn’t see anything there. Kaitlyn looked around her room, the walls pulsating with a purplish light. She let off a little spiritual steam so that she could float down toward the floor. There was a fuchsia journal sitting on the ground. She tried to remember her waking life, to recall if she had ever owned such a journal. “Illusion disappear!” she shouted, her voice coming out in a shimmering mist, green and blue. She reached out to pick it up; her body stretched with the motion, with her bare feet pointing up to the ceiling and her toes passing in and out of the lamp fixture. The filaments tickled. It was no good. The journal was solid and unresponsive to her astral reaching. Her hand passed right through. She let it go and willed herself up and through the doors. Again through the wall into her parents’ bedroom, revealing the image of her father sleeping alone and curled up in a half-fetal position. Once more down the hall and into the kitchen, where her mother was snoring peacefully on the linoleum. Something moved in the corner of Kaitlyn’s vision and she spun around to see her mother’s astral self, wandering about the house lost. The girl floated in front of her mother’s figure timidly; she had never witnessed her mother going out of body before, and wasn’t sure what to expect. Her mother didn’t seem to see her. “There are black flowers everywhere,” she whispered with a sickening smile. “They smell so nice. Like dying.” Her eyes glazed over and she floated through the wall into the pastures of her own mind. Her words sent a child through Kaitlyn, causing her to lose all control over her emotions. Suddenly she was thrust through the floor on waves of sadness, deep into the ground, spinning out of control through stratums of sediment and hot magma. The journey ended as suddenly as it had begun, but now she was in a dark, earthy room. She popped through the wall, in sync with another astral traveler. With some concentration she willed the room to become brighter, unable even in the light to recognize the man. She could see that his gaze was empty, a common occurrence for people who accidentally ended up out of body during their slumber. She knew that he was real—not simply a projection—because his aura radiated a colorful landscape of deep feeling and a rich sense of individuality. She tried talking to him to no avail. He turned away and projected the image of a chair and sat upon it. She noticed that he seemed comfortable in this room, as if he had visited it many times before. Books began to emerge on wooden shelves and upon the walls were paintings, raw, twisted, and hard to make out. She waited some moments to see if he would do anything else, but he remained stark still in his somber repose. Kaitlyn quickly tired of this particular journey and was eager to see something new. “Show me my spirit guide,” she muttered to herself. Usually the statement was accompanied by some drastic change in location or a loud sound that transitioned into interesting events. This time, she was greeted by silence. She suspected her will had not been focused enough. She called out again, “Show me my spirit guide.” Again nothing. Disappointed, she spun herself around to face the man. She felt her consciousness slipping away and put extra effort into increasing her focus. There was a loud ringing in her head that she found difficult to ignore. “Clarity,” she pronounced, trying to blink away the haze. For a brief moment she was rewarded with a crisp image of the man. He motioned with his hand, which was adorned by a white-faced puppet gazing through small pupils and sneering from behind black lips. While the man’s face did not move, the puppet crooned, “Look closer.” Her eyes shot open, the alarm clock sounding a chime of flesh and racing blood. Cold sweat beaded off her nose as she tried desperately to recall the dream that had instigated such a primal nightmare reaction within her. She was greeted instead by the cold, black darkness of a closed mental curtain. She sighed grumpily and shut off the alarm, frustrated and adrenaline-powered. That’s all she needed, was another one of those tired days weighed down by nightmares she couldn’t remember and the exhaustion that always came from half-sleep and stomach-wrenching psychosis. Kaitlyn threw back the covers and padded down the hallway into the kitchen. She was startled to see her mother there, beginning to make a pot of coffee. She wasn’t sure why it startled her as much as it did; she didn’t try to figure it out. Instead, she pondered her mother’s mental state for the morning as she was greeted by the woman’s heavy groan and frown. “You were walking in your sleep again,” her mother bit, “and you broke another glass. You should watch your step.” Normally Kaitlyn would argue, but today she didn’t feel up to it. Silently she grabbed a hunk of cheese from the drawer in the fridge and floated back out of the room, wishing for all the world she could wak |