Bambrielle

I’m living back at home. Douglas, my older brother, is too, for a short while at least. It’s late, like 2 or 3 or maybe even 4AM. I’m pacing the living room.
Someone comes to the back door. I don’t know who it could be so late at night, especially since our back door is pretty isolated from the main road. I open the curtains, it’s a man I don’t know, older. I let him in.
Douglas comes downstairs, probably to see what’s going on because the Man is attacking me now and looting the house. I don’t know why I let him in, maybe because he seemed so harmless...
Douglas bursts into action, taking the Man on, they struggle. I grab something heavy and hit the Man over the head with it. He crumples and dies.
Doug and I look at each other, eyes wide, then we both move in different directions looking for assorted items. I come back with a blanket, Doug has duct tape and cleaning supplies. We wrap up the body, and I clean up the blood.
The doorbell rings. It’s the police. Ma comes downstairs in her night gown, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“What are you both doing up? Who’s at the door?”
“It’s the police," I tell her.
“Why are the police here?” She asks, moving to clasp the doorknob.
“I don’t know,” I say, truthfully. They’re no way they know what just happened.
Douglas and I look at the body still lying in the middle of the floor along with all the supplies used to clean up his mess. Obviously he can’t stay there, but what do we do with him? I pose this question out loud to Douglas.
We both stare a moment longer, then he reaches down and lifts him up. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him. You hide everything else.”
I nod, and grab all the cleaning supplies, running up to my room. I know its dumb hiding evidence in my room because that’s just going to incriminate me. But I don’t want Ma to get in trouble, so I think really hard about where I should hide everything. The closet? Too obvious. Under the bed? The same. In the bed? Now that’s an idea. No one ever thinks to hid evidence IN their bed so the cops won’t look there. I scamper over to my pillows and stuff the assorted items in between the insane number of plush pillows that cover my bed. Then I move around my room and straighten up as much as I can--neat people are less suspicious.
I come back downstairs as mom finishes up talking with the police. They ask if they can come in do a routine sweep. Mom says ‘yes’ knowing that saying ‘no’ to a routine sweep would only bring more cops down on us, and as far as she knows, we have nothing to hide.
They move through the rooms, slowly, and they don’t search with any sort of immediacy so they aren’t making a mess of things which I really appreciate. There are two of them and they wear all black with black motorcycle helmets pulled down over their heads so I can’t tell anything about them except that they look like they’re in shape.
I have no idea what Douglas did with the body, only that he hid it somewhere in the garage. I probably would have tucked it up behind the water heater, but I suppose that's why Doug hid the body and I hid the cleaning supplies. The police move through the kitchen and through the garage and find nothing. For this, I am pleased.
Next they go upstairs. They open the spare bedroom, it’s a bit of a mess, so they don’t bother going in. Then they search Ma’s room, nothing. Then they come to mine. They open the closest, look under the bed, nothing. I’m in the clear.
They leave.
Douglas and I regroup in the living room.
“Now what do we do with the body?” I ask.
“What body?” Mom asks, joining us in the middle of the room.
“We get rid of it,” Doug says. “Go pop the trunk.”

I sit at a table on a covered, wooden, open-air deck somewhere in the mountains. I can see snow on the surrounding peaks, but it’s not cold. It feels more like the subtle warmth of spring. I’m here, in these mountains, at an elite boarding school for gifted students. But we’re not just gifted, we’re geniuses—the brightest of the bright, the top 1%.

There’s a game of Scrabble set up on the table before me, but the board is four times larger than normal. Wooden letters litter the table surface; some capitals, some lowercase, some cursive. It’s a puzzle of some kind and we’re supposed to solve it, but we haven’t made any progress. Usually we work in shifts, but the latest group of students gave up early and went inside to rest. I’m taking a turn alone at the board. I know we need gloves to touch the letters, so I slip on the last pair of latex gloves from the now empty glove box which I discard off to my right. In front of me is a large bowl, also wooden, filled with perfectly carved Scrabble letters. Slipping my gloved hands in the bowl, I sift through the smooth, wooden chips, but it feels like I can’t think with these ridiculous gloves on and I quickly become frustrated. Snapping the latex from my fingers, I toss them to the side and plunge my fingers back into the letters, relishing in the feeling of the soft, sanded letters along my fingertips. One of my peers walks up then, and gestures to the bowl my ungloved hands are sifting through.

“We’re supposed to wear gloves,” He says.

“I know,” I say, my attention never leaving the bowl.

He watches my fingers, as fascinated as I am, then sits quietly next to me at the table. I look at the surface in front of him which is covered with more letters. Abandoning the bowl, I turn my attention instead to the letters on the table. As I do, I notice that there are a bunch of A’s, a lot of N’s, some T’s, a few W’s, and all the other letters of the alphabet are sprinkled in. Reaching out, I begin to line the letters up and, as I do, I realize they’re not in alphabetical order which really bothers me because I know it will make sorting them take longer. The boy watches my growing frustration with surprised curiosity.

“What are you doing?” He asks.

“Sorting.” I say, continuing to shuffle letters around.

“Do you think that will help?” He asks.

I don’t respond; I don’t think it will help. I only hope it will let us see the problem more clearly.

“What can I get for you?” the fat man asks me. He sounds bored when he says it, and doesn’t even make eye contact. The pale brown hair on his head is thinning and the way his butt is leaking out of his metal folding chair cannot be comfortable. I guess I really can’t blame him for not loving what he does, it must be exhausting catering to the whims of cheerleaders and football players on their way to practice every day. I’m new to the team, and this is my first cheerleading practice, but eying the ingredients spread out across the fold-up table in front of him, I figure he could easily make my favorite breakfast treat.”
“Um, I’d like a bacon scramble, if that’s alright?” I look at him questioningly, just to be sure my request isn’t too outrageous.
“Sure,” He shakes his head and chuckles, then begins reaching for the plate of bacon that’s set out on the table, “I can make you a scramble, no problem.”
The way he says it, condescendingly and a tad bitter, has me worried and my worry quickly turns to apprehension when he proceeds to toss several pieces of bacon into the bright red blender sitting on the table before him. I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming. It’s the only piece of kitchenware amongst all the food items there on the plastic surface. I guess I just didn’t expect the blender to be applicable given my order. My mistake.
Cheddar cheese, egg, bell pepper, potato, green onion, salt, and pepper all follow the bacon into the blender. I’m relieved, at least, that he got all the right stuff in there, but then he hits the “blend” button and my relief turns quickly back to apprehension, then to horror as everything is slowly ground to a pale, pink mush. Thirty seconds later he stops the blender, pours the well-blended contents into a large cup, drops in a pink bendy straw, and offers me my drink with a satisfied smirk.
“Uh, thanks,” I say, gingerly taking the cup from his chubby hand and moving away from the table so the next girl can get her “drink.”
Peering into the cup I use the bendy straw to push the thick substance around and grimace at its paste-like texture. It looks terrible, but everything in it is delicious so maybe… I take a small sip, hoping it won’t taste as horrible as it looks and find myself somewhat surprised that it tastes only half as bad.
I must have been wearing my disappointment on my face because one of my teammates comes up and rubs my shoulder reassuringly.
“Do you not like your drink?” She asks gently.
I give the pink paste another push with my bendy straw, “I don’t know why he felt the need to ‘blend’ everything—all he had to do was push ‘pulse’ a few times and it would have been fine.”

(9/4/14)

I'm standing in an old fashioned kitchen that looks like it was build in the 20s. In front of me on the counter are two knives lying side by side; one fat like a butcher knife, the other thin and small like a vegetable knife. I'm dressed in a pale, floral print dress as if I'm from the 20s too and all the colors in the room are washed out under the weak overhead light. Everything except the knives which glean bright and metallic from their spots on the counter. Slowly, I reach forward to pick up the butcher knife as though I'm not sure what I'm doing or why I'm here. And really, I'm not. But before I can grasp the cool metal in my palm a noise from my right distracts me.

I spin quickly to face the sound and find Colin Ferguson (Eureka 2006) standing in my dining room on the far side of the table. Normally, I'm sure I would be absolutely stoked to have Colin Ferguson alone in my home, but the expression he's wearing says he's not here for coffee and sex. Rather, the look he's giving me says he has every intention to kill.

He steps quickly, around the table, and directly toward me but I counter by scuttling sideways in an effort to keep the table between us, the knives now completely forgotten where they lay. He pauses, and his anger deepens as he realizes that I'm avoiding him. Then he tries, once more, to step around the table and I, once more, move to keep it between us. We continue this charade, back and forth, several times, and I know that this will never end. Frantically, I try to think of what I did to get Colin Ferguson so mad at me and I can't, for the life of me, think of what I could have done. Just yesterday my life was so boring, so normal, so...

I freeze and on the other side of the table, Colin Ferguson does too. He doesn't understand what I'm doing and I think he's worried I've got some sort of plan. I don't have a plan, but it's just occurred to me that my life is never this exciting. My life is mundane, normal, and never in a million years would I be in a situation where a celebrity is trying to kill me. There's no other explanation--this must be a dream.

As soon as the thought hits me, I'm lucid. I can hardly believe it! I take a deep breath and look around the room in wonder. It's taken me so long and, finally, here I am! I want to jump up and down for joy but from across the table Colin Ferguson has figured out that I've forgotten he's even there and that doesn't please him. With new gusto he makes to move around the table, his anger radiating from him like some sort of aura of death.

In a panic, my dream looses some clarity and dims back to the muted colors it was before, but I'm still lucid and I remember something that Canis Lupis and Ophelia Blue mentioned in the podcast about what to do when your dream characters are trying to kill you. Concentrating as hard as I can, I tell myself the Colin Ferguson is only rushing around the table so that he can give me the best hug of my life because he's my best friend and I love him. It takes a moment, but I manage to turn my feelings of absolute terror into feelings of tentative love and I open my arms wide to him as he rounds the final corner of the table and powers straight into my embrace. The hug is weak, and Colin Ferguson's expression is still one of complete and utter hatred and death, but he's hugging me and I'm not dead! But then I think about how just a moment before, he was wearing that same expression and trying to ensure my certain demise and I wonder if this hug wasn't a bad idea after all. It's only a flicker, but in the millisecond that that thought occurs, the fear is back and I know Colin Ferguson felt it and I spoiled everything.

He pulls away from our embrace at the same time I do, but I'm slightly faster and, with all the strength I can muster, I plant my palms on his chest and shove. He stumbles backwards giving me a few precious seconds, and I spin around to face the giant, pane glass window that's in the wall behind me. It's a nice window, probably my favorite one in the hole of my imaginary home, but I know I have no other choice as I sprint as fast as I can over the ten feet to that window, Colin Ferguson less than two steps behind me. I've never flown in my dreams before, but I hope I'm a natural because once I hit that glass, the ground is long way down. Pushing through the last few steps, I lift my forearm to protect my face and throw myself through the delicate panes...
and wake up in bed.