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She focuses on it - this new found sense, flexing the thin membrane delicately. Her pale fingers twisted beneath the table top with the fragility of a butterfly’s wing, how far did it stretch? She reached, her awareness spreading, seeping mistily through walls.
Slowly she turned her head in response to the yet un-spoken question. It was a simple courtesy drummed into her again, and again and again, until it pattered with her heart that plastered the answer to the roof of her mouth.
“You’re very quiet today. How did your session with Dr. Mathias go?”
She felt the gush of images flood his head- subjects aborted - we’re doing such good work “He gave me a mission.”
A statement of fact, or was it fiction? Did it matter to the princess why there was pea?
“Really?”
No. It was her mission. Now that they had shattered her into a thousand rainbows, all sparkly in the sunlight - mosaic’s tumbled in bags then all shook up. Which were her pieces – which weren’t – Miranda…Pax
“Did he tell you your mission out loud? Or did you just… hear it?”
The membrane trembled – that awareness! Touching the edge of hers with angel feather softness, baby blue Simon streaky with orange anxiety for its fringe of lilac, her. That smell! Fire crackling merrily in its living room hearth as he studied- this whole conclusion, it’s fallacious – and wild hodgeberries from when…
“He plays Hide and Seek with me.”
“Dr. Mathias?”
She answers – it’s automatic now. “My brother.”
She extends the membrane, thinner, thinner – snap! It flings back firmly leaving her reeling from the blow. What was the conclusion of all those fallacious theories? Did he get the letters?
“He’s a doctor. He thinks he can find me… but I am deep down… and I do not make… a sound.”
She was too lost in the bag. Were all the pieces even there before the darkness and the chaos? When the sun was out, and she walked with her feet, heard with her ears. What was she? What is she? Assassin? Psychic?
“River, what mission did Dr. Mathias give you?” He’s frightened into shades of yellow, no subject’s progressed this far before.
“I can’t tell you”
He’s trying to sound soothing, like one of the core bred psychiatrists her parent’s sent her to, “you can tell me anything. You know that.”
He reeks of yellow too strongly. He’s afraid of the answer. Flashes of those two-by-two hands-of- blue. Of her. He should be, she’ll show him – her the puzzle with no pieces.
She doesn’t want to watch – can’t look, can’t look - she knows the end already, it’s painted on the walls.
So she’ll drift away… In the distance - “Can’t tell. I’ll have to write it down.”
She’s free now, drifting - where the rest of heaven is blue, free from the demon in her view.