Spice

Len died every night.

He wasn't supposed to, but he always did.

Rin will be sunken under blankets of ocean, echoing cracked-silk voices in her head as the dreams drag her skyward to a Wonderland where nobody gets hurt and nobody sees colour like we do;

Then Len will awake with toes curled tight like cashew nuts and shoulders hunched and eyes rolled up to the ceiling under his twitching dragonfly wing eyelids—the dragonflies are crushed to pieces on the top bone of his eye socket and with a buried voice will utter, "I died, Rin."

And like if someone has ripped a petal from a flower, as fast and as clean and as permanent as that, Rin will wake up too; she will lean over her top bunk with her hair in her eyes and ask how. No grog of sleep now grips her.

And Len will answer something different every night. He will speak in the deep sunken voice of many stories and adventures. Not many are long. But all end the same.

There are grating stories of being locked in a castle that the walls smell of blood and the breakfasts taste like elastic tendons. Len is a servant, here, with his head low. On the silver platter, fingers and spines sizzle and roast in the acidic air but he can never let it burn. He carries tray after tray into a twilit room where the air tastes like fish scales on fire. He passes the tray to a table where a woman sits, her mouth twisted, her dress like slashed skin, and her eyes like a marrow of hell.

She dives into the platter without utensils—her long nails clink the plates and over-flowing goblets like forks, themselves. Her fleshy mouth, teeth like bullets, gapes when she devours without breathing.

Long since has this woman of bloody castle dreams eaten fine food like steaks or pastry or wine or escargot. Tonight, like many nights, she feasts on stringy meat that once wore a child's pink kimono with ornate chopstick in her silky hair. Crimson fluid squirts from between the gluttonous Conchita's teeth, and this Len tries to not think of what it is.

Len had said the night this dream flitted in his mind, "She grabs me by the collar, and her teeth of steak knives sink into my skull. And that is how I die."

There are flute stories where Rin appears. (Whenever he mentions that she had appeared in the dream she curses herself for not saving him.) There are stories where she in a princess who knows no definition of compassion. Her dresses are gauzy and light and beautiful as chamomile tea and floating on blood-bleeding rivers in the moon. Len is her servant where he tends to her slitted-glass voice without a moment hesitation.

The night he told this story in his bed, he said to Rin, "We're both beautiful, with silhouettes of black."

In the world of that story, the world hates Rin. They start a war against her, holding their swords of untouched smooth aluminum colour. The princess's eyes look like aluminum too, but crinkled and crushed foil under a blue light when she cries, fearful of her future execution as the enemy takes control of her country. Then her servant speaks to her as they hide in the castle and she cries—of the frozen ocean and the lapping waves to swallow her ankle—of waterfalls that scream and hit the rocks with noises like a million shattering gypsy skulls.

"I say you will see these places and more; that the world will never cheat you like this. I disguise myself as you and you as me, and I am put to the guillotine. And that is how I die."

Tonight, this night in April early birth, Rin leans over the top bunk to see her twin brother on the lower bed. He lays still and his eyes glazed of winter—confused and the shock of the dreams written in his paper features.

"What did you dream of, Len?" She is curious. He's died a hundred strange ways in the night—but none of them are real because, after all, children don't die.

She watches a throbbing of his pulse and imagines what could have happened in his head this night. Cheshire cats to lead him to hell? An army of crooked cannibals to taste his marrow? Perhaps dying in a snow-storm—immobilized by tragedy?

Len stares empty when he starts to tell, "I'm...I'm a teenager," he says, "Normal school, but I'm a player with the girls."

Rin shares the expression that befalls his face. Confusion.

He ends, "And I get HIV. And that is how I die."