Week 28, day 5, dream | perfect place to watch the world go down in flames
[The House appears in your dreams often enough that the architecture it takes on there is familiar to you by now, the gables giving improbable way to trees stretching up from the roof. Their bark's black, rain-slick, a few leaves stubbornly clinging to the upper branches, but you climb up one of them with an ease you'd never feel trying this in real life, and sit in the damp crook of the split trunk. It seems as if there are acres of roof to look out over, peaks and valleys of a slated landscape.
It's late, late October, and you feel like it might rain forever.
The House is crumbling from the inside out. The smaller children cry at night, though they can't, or won't, say what nightmares wake them, or what fears keep them from sleep. You feel it, too, even though you're one of the older ones here, at fourteen. A heaviness in the air, and you're afraid, for the first time in years, that this home will be just like all the rest, in the end, a temporary stop that gets taken away from you.
Your best friend feels it more than most, hides up here when he's not buried in papers or picking fights, gone almost feral.
"Something's coming," says a singsong voice, and Linda emerges from a window below you, colored pencils stuck in her ponytails to free her hands as she climbs up, red and orange and blue and green bright against the dim sky.
"Something bad," you say. "I know."
"It's already in the world." She gazes off toward the horizon, where the bloodred sunset sets all the clouds ablaze. "Just coming for us, now."
"Us us?" you say, fumbling for the pack of cigarettes in your vest, wanting the reassurance of hauling the acrid smoke into your lungs.
"All of us," Linda answers, and sighs. "The whole alphabet."
"I don't want it to."
"Everything's going to change." She settles on the roof, leaning against the trunk of a tree that has split the stone tiles it grows from, plucks orange from a ponytail and draws two ovals on the slate: your goggles. "Not even these can hide you."
"They don't know our names."
Linda meets your eyes for a beat, blinks. "They don't need them."]