A Broken Wing

15. Rain

“Honey will help you sleep.”

Now she had seen its face the devils began haunting her brain, overseeing wild dreams controlled by blindness and thoughts that the sun would never die. A numb insomnia in between both realities possessed her and at night, when others were dreaming in their beds, she sat awake thinking of a far away island. On her island she would walk and never even blink. She didn’t know where he was or what had happened to the owner of the rattle. The endless nights on her island of moonshine and perfect weather made her lips try to never say never but she was wrong. The wilderness of her daze shouldn’t have lasted so long, yet she would wake from a sleepless sleep and continue to walk. All around her the bombs fell but she continued to walk searching for home, a place to sleep. She was building a life on drugs with a new family.

“You never hold on at all.”

The stretched panels lived out in front of her like a sun bleached highway. Half a dozen children sat either side staring forward into the darkened forest around them. On the table in front lay empty plates awaiting their meal like canvases for the first splashes of a new painting. Honey took her seat at one end looking down the highway to the head of the table and its empty seat. A body emerged behind her and walked around the edge her vision. It gradually came from the periphery into focus, the outline of a huge Bear holding a shopping bag. A giant paw dipped into the bag and pulled an unknown gift from its depths. The paw placed this present on the plate in front of a child before journeying back into the plastic cloud and repeating this ritual, working his way around the table. The bringer of gifts turned his head to look at Honey. She drew sharply, a rush of breath filling her lungs like a crisp tide as she saw the blankness gaze at her. There were no eyes, no nose and no mouth, nothing at all.

“The bees made you.”

Honey looked around at the youthful faces with empty eyes, she was the mother of these lost children, and the Bear without a face was their provider, bringing them each a sunrise. He sat at the head of the table atop his throne in the woods, watching them all with that face that did not exist. Honey stared down at the plate before her and in its centre was a solitary pill, a tiny orange circle in a white china ocean. It was with a whisper that the voices started and curled around the circle like the veins in an eyeball whose pupil was a fruit.

“We don’t love you.”

Her hand reached out and lifted the sunshine from her plate, synchronised with the children around her. A dozen small hands reaching out to their artificial suns, Honey’s mind and body calling out for her son who was gone in a neon blink, before he had even lived. It rose to her open lips and danced with her tongue before it was received warmly and retreated into her mouth. Her eyes remained forwards at the Bear in front of her, the forest king whose paws rolled a cigarette full of quick sugar cherry. The table and woods began to fill with colour, downloading a new palette for the children, painting by numbers. She looked down once more and next to her plate lay a revolver, inviting her touch like a forbidden fruit.

It was cold in her hands, the metal a silver ice with lethal intent. The barrel touched her lips and gently pushed them apart in a tender kiss. She looked down the panelled highway at the Bear. The world was silent and slow. The breeze that moved the leaves now disappeared whilst Honey remained in real time, faster than reality. The Bear’s head tilted up and down nodding as she held the gun in her mouth. She removed the gun and pointed it at the Bear’s head, aiming at where there should have been a face. The Bear remained motionless staring forward at her with invisible eyes and Honey squeezed the trigger twice. There were now two crimson eyes in the Bear’s face, bloody tears running down from the two perfect circles that punctured the sphere atop the king’s shoulders. There was a perfect stillness around the table, the Bear raised his arms to either side of his head and lifted. The head came cleanly off and beneath, what had in actual fact been inside the suit was a human.

Honey looked with empty shock at James’ face and the two red holes where his eyes had once been. There was nothing, just emptiness inside of her, a tear escaped her but she did not know why.

She closed her eyes and woke up.

“I need you to take this.”

 “What is it?”

Sleepy words will make bad dreams better.

“This will help.”

“It’s not orange.”

A circle sky upon sleepy lips will make bad words good.

The clouds moved across her eyes, morphing and twisting, gliding and changing with the forces that pushed them. They were like the sails of boats being driven on by the breath of a child, or the marks left by a paintbrush when there is little paint left on its hairs. There was no noise, only the white whispers that were spoken to the ever listening blue above.

She lay on her back gazing up at the silent film. Her arms would not move and her legs refused to walk, she had no reason to change, everything was at peace. A body weighted down by anguish is the same as one tied down by bliss, change unrefreshed by fear or desire. She could feel the Earth moving beneath her, spinning slowly on its axis like the pointed toe of a dancer. The clouds moved with her and she was one of them, a something impossible to grasp and to keep, a memory too hard to lock in a box, something pure. A shimmering shoal of skyfish, she could swim on that wave with her memories forever. However, she would darken and grey, grow heavy with painful memories, eventually breaking from their strain before fading to nothing as all that remains are her imprints in droplets, falling to the ground where they too would burst.

These fell onto the stretched red canvas of an umbrella, a waterproof heart manufactured to be resistant to bad memories, like a hand reluctant to help the poor, a cold welcome. The tears cried from the silent skies would run off onto the ground and into the darkness below the recesses of the mind.

It would rain forever.