Weekly Drabble #360: A Star Is Born (Patreon)

This prompt comes from William M. with 'hopes and dreams', giving us a look into a delicate conversation. Enjoy!

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A Star Was Born:

“I don’t dream,” Cassandra said. “Not anymore.”

“Everyone dreams,” Dana replied. “Even if we don’t remember it, we all dream every time we sleep-”

“I don’t sleep, either.”

“That’s not true.”

“I close my eyes and darkness comes-”

“That’s what we normally call sleep-”

“-but it’s not sleep. It’s like falling down an endless cavern, so big you can’t even see the sides – not that there’s any light to begin with. At first you’re terrified, but soon you realize that there is no bottom. You can scream all you want, but no one will hear you. No one even knows you’re there. Eventually you just close your eyes and embrace it, but your mind never goes blank and you can still feel yourself falling. That’s what I have now,” the young woman pulled her knees up to her chin. “A hole in my mind.”

“Poetic, but a reoccurring dream is still a dream.”

Cassandra tilted her head, fixing her visitor with an emotionless stare. In photographs and video of her before the incident, she’d have been described as a bombshell. Seventeen years old, blonde and blue-eyed with a body that had turned every head in her high school. The twenty-two year old woman behind the tempered glass of the cell might as well have been a different person. It might have been the five years she been kept inside, but her skin had turned a hue somewhere between the colour of the moon and a blood-drained corpse. Her eyes were darker, no longer a cheery, exuberant blue. She’d once radiated an untouchable haughtiness, the very image of a popular ‘mean girl’ who knew her place was at the top of the pecking order and wasn’t afraid to use that power.

Now she was like a tightly-wound spring, on edge even alone in her maximum-security room. Her eyes, once full of a teenager’s confidence and exuberance held a darkness that had nothing to do with her enlarged pupils. Instead of being always in motion, chattering and laughing, she was often so still that it felt like she wasn’t even breathing and when she moved, it was with an eerie, almost inhuman glide, like a jaguar stalking through the bush.

“Talk to Dr. Metzger if you don’t believe me. I don’t enter REM sleep and I barely go into anything they can identify as a sleep state.”

“That’s not possible. If you don’t dream and you don’t sleep, you’d be dead.”

Cassandra shrugged, leaning back against the wall. Her room was limited to the bare essentials; a basic cot, toilet and small sink. Her time at the H. Wilkins Psychiatric Hospital had been marked by outbursts of intense violence including the murder of an orderly, and she wasn’t allowed anything hard or sharp aside from a single luxury item: a wooden easel with the screws removed and its frame glued together. There was a stack of paper and parchment on it and a set of crayons. She wasn’t given paint brushes, markers, pens or pencils. “I think I like this better this way,” she admitted. “I don’t want to dream.”

“Why not?”

A strange look crossed the young woman’s face. She went quiet for so long that Dana thought she wasn’t going to answer. “The last dream I remember...” she began, then stopped and shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What was it?”

“It was nothing. Drop it.”

Dana stood, coming to the very edge of the yellow line that marked out an arm’s length from the girl’s cell. “You said you wouldn’t lie to me.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to tell you anything.”

“Cassandra...”

“It was a fucking sex dream, all right? I had two crushes. There was this quiet, cute Korean exchange student called Haneul and one of the boys from the neighbourhood. I had a dream about both of them fucking me at once. Is that enough for you, officer?” Cassandra slumped even further against the wall. Both of the women were quiet for a long time. “Haneul moved back to Korea sometime during my trial. I never did get to talk to her.”

“What happened with the boy?”

Cassandra raised her head. It was like looking down into the abyssal waters of the ocean. “His name was Alan Taylor.”

“Ah.” No further explanation was needed. Dana knew the case files like the back of her hand. Alan Taylor had been found in one of the unfinished houses in the Sundew Valley subdivision chained to a load-bearing column. Cassandra had used a nailgun to staple his hands and feet to the wooden pillars and shot nails into his eyes. Then she’d cut through his stomach and ribs with a circular saw, spilling all his insides over the floor.

There’d been a lot of horrible things in Sundew Valley. That was just one of them and, near as anyone could tell, all of them them were because of the young woman in front of Dana.

“So, detective Mueller... does that answer your question about my hopes and dreams?”