asakiyume | The Case of Maddie Lawrence

Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with petals and starlight, and then at some point she blinks and starts and thinks, Did I just doze off ?

And,

Where am I, again?

There’s a lake up ahead, filled with water lilies. Some are breaking free from their stems and rising off the lake, spinning lazily into the air.

Is she maybe dreaming? Did I maybe leave out the part where she got home, collapsed on the couch without brushing her teeth, and fell asleep?

Maybe I’m the one that’s dreaming, or maybe you are.

It gets worse. Who am I, again? she’s thinking. She knits her brow, trying to pull together some thoughts, trying to make some sense of things, but the only thought that comes to her is something about bells—is it that the lilies can be rung, like bells, if you catch one?

Maddie has that nagging feeling that she needs to remember something. It’s important, so she strains to, shuts her eyes squint-closed and presses her lips together hard, but it’s no good.

When she opens her eyes, someone with black and white fur on their cheeks standing in front of her, someone with a red tattoo in the shape of a star between their eyes.

“Lanterns, or bells?” this person asks, holding out both hands, and in both hands are lilies, tugging to be free from this person’s grasp. Those on the right are glowing slightly; those on the left chime, subsonically, when they brush against each other.

“Bells,” says Maddie, and the person smiles and hands her a lily, and she smiles and takes it.