Miles and miles and... (part two)

(Curious? Part One is Here)

"I won't let you keep hurting me," she says, not a child's voice any more. "I won't. And you can't control me anymore."

Sylvia hears. Sylvia smiles. Sylvia makes the girl (not a child any more) scream again.

The scream jolts me, but not enough. I lapse...

Somehow, the girl breaks free - again? as always? Her footsteps echo, moving quickly down hallways, stairs. Quick little steps - lots of echoes.

Sylvia laughs. Her footsteps do not echo.

The echoes pause, start, stop, but not for long. She's not lost, never lost - can't be lost - but the place is unfamiliar and she makes a wrong turn.

Sylvia smiles and the girl screams again.

The scream jolts me and this time I become aware of a point of view. I feel the smile but in the darkness, I cannot see - not the girl, not Sylvia, not the hallways. It is all darkness - my eyes will not open, but I feel her smile.

The girl screams again, a long scream, gaining in intensity and tone until there is no sound, until the scream itself is silence.

I lapse in that scream - losing my point of view, like opening eyes in total darkness.

The scream ends - no trailing off, no whimpering, nothing - just true silence, which floods my attention with such force that I am pushed back. Sylvia smiles again and again and again - all at me now. All at me. I don't like her smile. I know her smile. I know and suddenly I know that I am more than a point of view, that I know her smile like I know my face, like I know my own cruelty - but to Sylvia's growing dismay, I am not scared. She frowns, a painful expression somehow worse than the smile.

As if in desperation, Sylvia makes the girl (not a child any more) scream. A short scream that quickly degrades into whimpering and crying. The girl whispers something I cannot hear - she is so far away now.

I open my eyes and, for lack of a better word, come awake. The couch under me is familiar, but I'm not immediately sure why.

"Oh good dear, you're awake. We were so worried." I turn toward the voice and look into the eyes of Sylvia. Her eyes but the face is older: a wasteland of cracks and crevices. I grin at her, feeling her smile crease my own cheeks. Then I remember Raylyn and look to see the bastard still sitting at the cute little table with a lace napkin stuffed in his collar.

"Hey fucker," I call to him, grasping Sylvia's shoulder to leverage myself into a vertical position; my legs throb only slightly. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her fighting a frown and I stifle a laugh - I don't want to show all my cards. Not yet.

I smile toothily at Raylyn, who stiffens and tries not to look at me. "I would just adore a cup of tea - be a dear wouldya? And I could just murder one of those tasty little cakes."

Fractures

First there was light, like a broadening definition of existence. Something external in the darkness outlining the details of space. Something I had never seen. I reached out to take hold of the light, to grasp the space in fingers too thick to do anything but part the space into light and shadow; too thick for anything but shadows.

As I extended my arm, it became a solar system - an ancient relief of tensions in a universe that requires opposites, that requires strangers to forever be on the verge of meeting. On the verge.

My shoulder drifted into a constellation and got stuck, forcing my elbow to hinge around and trace the tail of a comet; a jet stream of ancient data reaching out toward distant points, which twinkled with laughter as I tripped on the event-horizon of an untied black hole. My knee collided with a globular cluster, sending each object spinning off into orbit. I would have kept going too, the dark matter only of consequence to an outside observer but a spike of solar wind slowed my collapse and I managed to grab onto a nearby binary system to steady myself.

This caused the bigger of the two bodies to tense up, struggling against ancient vendettas and imbalance but failing. This time, it supernovaed into old patterns, destroying the plateau it had worked so hard to create, scaring off its closest friend and singeing my eyebrows. The sudden reaction made my hair dance with waves of heat, like desert mirages of water, weaving nebula storms until it froze in the coldness of space, letting off only a little dark haze as it sizzled to a stand still.

Something above me and to my left caused my attention to drift with particle waves and I looked up, stretching to see over the present representation of the past-in-motion and there, just beyond my own effectiveness of change on universal extremes, I saw the mirror.