Feathered Heart

She ran into the bedroom, laughing, the curls of her hair bobbing up and down like loaded springs. She looked like some kind of goddess from an ancient time, a mystical girl from a dreamland. I could feel how much I loved her, as if she were an important heirloom, a prized possession. My prized possession. But I also felt undeserving, and it still feels so unreal that I’m with Anu. I’d been blessed with certain attributes that always put me above the rest. Good looks, a good physique, and a natural affinity for sports, yet all those things felt like a stroke of unfair luck. You can’t acquire looks through hard work. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an ancient time, born into royalty, unfair to the people who don’t possess a similar genetic lineage. But that’s just the way it is. Who am I to say otherwise? I'm a part of the blessed tier. With all the evolution that’s occurred over the course of humankind, it seems we’ve never been able to evolve out of this sense of born social hierarchy. It’s been pressed in like glue, an unchangeable code in the human DNA, the idea of some being born higher up on the social ladder than others.

I continued watching Anu dance around my bedroom, like a wild child in a flower garden. She looked as though she belonged to the flowers, not here, in my bedroom, with me.

The TV was on out in the living room and I could hear it broadcasting through the open door.

“…as a trickster archetype, jackals use their intelligence, cunning and enterprising to feed on unlikely animals along their travels. These canines are opportunistic, outsmarting challengers for their next meal while adapting to unexpected changes by relying on their stealth.”

Sometimes I wished I could’ve been born an animal. Like a bear. Solitary but powerful, and with no sense of hierarchical value among them. Non-territorial equals, valuing qualities of courage, strength and protection. But I lacked a lot of those things.

I grabbed Anu by the arm and pulled her over to the bed. “Come here.”

“Yes, your highness,” she replied, as we giggled and fell into an embrace until we were laughing out loud, lying in a heap on the unkept sheets. I sat on top of her, staring into her eyes, like some kind of warped scene from the Lion King.

The Jackal and the Bear.

“Do you think happiness like this can last forever?” she asked.

I thought about it. “I don’t know. I think if you fight for it, it’s possible. But things are always changing, being manipulated by the inner workings of the universe. By some kind of powerful spirit that wants to test your resolve. Your love. Throwing speed humps in your path to overcome or be overcome by. I do think happiness can be maintained, but you have to constantly work to reestablish it, the image in your mind. You can’t let it stagnate. And when it does change, you have to find that thing in it once again that you loved to begin with. Adapt. Sometimes it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Or so I’ve read.”

She stroked a piece of hair away from my ear with the back of her hand, staring at me as if I were a Monet. Nobody had ever looked at me like that. Then she lay her hand over my chest, against my heart, her face turning sorrowful.

“Your heart is always so heavy. You’ll never move on if you can’t learn to lighten it.”

I smiled. “I have everything I need right here. You. This. It’s all mine.”

Her face became even sadder, as if I’d said the wrong thing, misunderstanding the importance of her words, and she was disappointed in me. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to understand her, blessed with looks, just another intellectually vacant royal.

“You haven’t…” she started, but her words were cut short, like a telephone line being snipped with scissors. Silence. Something tangible began to pulsate in the room, undulating like a membrane, as if we were suddenly on the inside of an animals mouth. Or inside somebodies mind. I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t so much a physical feeling as it was metaphysical. I couldn’t decide if it was happening inside my mind or outside in reality. Anu cocked her head to the side and stared at me, confused. I could see her lips move, shaping the words, “is everything okay?” but I couldn’t hear her. The only sound my ears were picking up was the sound of rustling coming from outside the bedroom, down the hall in another room. But nobody was supposed to be home for another hour at least. Was somebody in the house? I could no longer hear the TV either, as if it too had been silenced. I strained to put a visual to the rustling sound. The only image I could conjure was of dry grass flattening under moving feet.

The sound began moving closer and closer, towards my bedroom. I put my finger to my lips, telling Anu to be quiet, but it wasn’t like she was making a noise anyway. Her mouth was moving rapidly now, but only silence was coming out from between her lips like the plumbings of her vocal cords had been stitched closed. A TV with the volume turned all the way down.

The rustling had made it into the hall now and with every breathe I took I could sense the air descending on us, palpable like smoke.

Ma’at….bissssss…Ma’at.

Something was accompanying the rustling of the dry grass. A voice? My heart started to beat in double time, four beats for every syllable that crept around the bend in the hallway. I began to panic. Fear rose inside me like water being poured into a cup. My bedroom was listening to the beating of my heart, like it was alive, sending mutinous intel to the creature outside its walls. Everything from the doorway to my bedroom outwards was black. Darkness. But it wasn’t nighttime. Did all the lights get turned off? My door frame had become a portal to something cunning and opportunistic. I could taste it in the air. I looked at Anu. She was screaming, rage on her face, as if I’d done something wrong, made the wrong decision, but still only silence emerged from her mouth.

Ma’at…bisssssss…Ma’at.

I tried to clear my mind, stop the undulating walls, pour the fear back out into a hypothetical sink. The rustling was getting closer, the dead grass crunching to the portals edge. Anu was standing now, trying to hit me her face crimson red, hatred in her eyes. My heart felt unbearably heavy, like a granite stone. I had to ignore her. I didn’t want to. I wanted to tell her I loved her. That she was my happiness. I wanted her to finish her sentence, but survival took precedence.

If only I had’ve been born a bear.

But it was too late. The rustling was upon us and we were doomed. I turned to face the door just in time to see something brown and hairy appear around the lowest corner of the door frame. The portal was opening. My chance was vanishing. I turned back and took one giant leap in Anu’s direction, spearing her onto the bed, shielding her from whatever was hunting her. Hunting us. It was the second we landed on top of my bed that it came over me like a wave of clarity.

This was a dream.

I knew it like I knew the Earth was round. A sense of vibrant lucidity came over me. I felt the sheets beneath my hands melt away instantly, as if I were falling through the bed, not onto it. I fell with Anu into the sheets, pushed into a freezing pool of water that instantly stole my breath and squeezed my lungs closed. Wake up, I told myself, this isn’t real. I evaporated into the membrane of the mattress, transformed into thick, moving liquid, and then…

My eyes shot open and I drew in a massive breath of air as if I’d been deprived of oxygen for minutes. I was staring at my ceiling, laying on my back, in my bed.

“Iorek. Iorek. Hey, it’s okay. Iorek, look at me.”

Anu was sitting up in bed next to me, her pyjama top half off her shoulder, her curls messy from sleep. She was looking at me with a worried expression, her hands gripping my shoulders.

“Did I do it again?” I asked. “Did I say the wrong thing again?”

She nodded. “It was just a dream.”

I sat up against the bed frame and turned on the bedside light. Anu’s was already on, bathing the room in a mystical glow of amber that seemed to burn away any remnants of the night terror inside my imagination, like a ray of sunlight against a vampires skin. I sighed with relief, and heard Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place playing from somewhere in another room.

It was only a dream.

Though she’d just woken up, Anu looked magical, like a beautiful exotic animal one could only discover grazing in the savanna of ones dreams. I stared at her in cathexis. She caught my eyes and smiled.

“Tell me what you dream about,” she said.

She looked just like a child getting ready for a bedtime story as she rolled to her side and lay her head in her palm, her curls lulling against the pillow, eyes boring into my mind like she could already see inside it, rendering the need to paint the pictures of my imagination useless. But I did as she asked anyway.

“Hmm. Usually I dream about happiness. I dream about a girl dancing in a floral forest, draped in mystery and beauty. The curls in her hair are always bobbing up and down, like an extension of her dance, a collaborator, not merely just lifelessly existing. She’s like a mysterious creature. And she’s all mine. She belongs to me. Mostly, I dream about you.”

She smiled, then leaned in and kissed me. “I would accompany you anywhere. I would even come with you to the afterworld if I had to. That’s how much I love…” She paused mid sentence as if something more important had appeared in her mind, her brow creased in thought. “But what about the rustling? Your heart’s still too heavy.”

“The rustling isn’t important,” I said, and I kissed her hard, running my hands through her hair. She began to touch my bare chest, her cold fingertips sending small shocks down my torso. Then she rolled over as lightly and gracefully as if she were a feather, until she was straddled on top of me. She looked into my eyes with a flirtatious smile and lay a hand over my heavy heart. I had the distinct feeling that if I’d been the one to climb on top of her, the weight of my heart would’ve crushed her, as if I were as heavy as a bear.

The Jackal and the Bear.

She began to slide down my body, beneath the sheets, kissing the landmarks of my torso along the way. The top of my chest, my nipple, the centre of my sternum, my belly button, until she’d vanished. I could feel her lips wrap themselves around me beneath the sheets, like two silicone ice cubes, soft and malleable. I pictured myself walking into the school grounds holding her hand. The predatory eyes of all the jealous underlings staring, planning on how to take her from me. But I was royalty and they were commoners. I could sense their cunning appetites, their calculating eyes trying to find a weak spot in my happiness, wanting to feed on and pry away what was mine. But they could never have her, because Anu belonged to me.

"But what about the rustling?”

A jolt of electricity went through my mind, like a pin had pricked the region of my brain that housed continuity. How did Anu know about the rustling? She was still beneath the sheets, moving along me, her silicone lips funnelling serotonin from her tongue into my body. I whispered her name urgently. “Anu.” And as if like an echo in the large chamber of my mind, I heard the voice once again, a connector, responding to my calling.

Ma’at…bissssss…Ma’at.

The sound seemed to appear from no particular point of origin this time, as if it already existed inside my bedroom long before I’d found myself here, awoken by the previous night terror. It enveloped the space between spaces. The fear was back. What was going on? All I knew was that I needed to protect Anu. Something was trying to take her from me. But there was no way I’d ever let that happen. I tried to grab her attention, speaking her name again, louder this time. “Anu.” But the voice echoed back at me like a string tying together my voice with its. The red string of fate.

Anu-bissssss…Anu-bissssss…Anu-bissssss.

The two words wove into themselves as if to create one singular echo, an accompaniment to the other, like what the entity was attempting to do with me. Become one with me, an echo of myself. It wanted to accompany me somewhere. It wanted to tell me something.

I grabbed Anu with all my strength and shook her shoulders beneath the sheets until her silicone-like lips came free, like a leech that’d been suctioned to me, extracting my life-force. I felt weaker. The lump beneath the sheets froze. I called her name again, but something felt wrong. The sudden feeling that I was all alone, trapped beneath the pressure of something bigger than me, took over.

Suddenly, the sheet was ripped off and the face of an animal, hairy and hungry leapt towards me, replacing Anu’s face but retaining her curls and her soft brown collarbones underneath her pyjama straps. I lost my breath and my ability to move. I was paralysed, under the charm of the hunter, like a snake to the Indians pungi. The featureless animal face flew towards me, the echo chamber in my mind screaming, “Ma’at. Anu-bissss.”

In the moment before I shut my eyes for the final time, a realisation swept over me. It was me all along. I was the prey. I was the hunted. I was the vulnerable scrap of food, unstable and uncertain. It was never about Anu. I was the one being judged. The possessiveness I believed to be my happiness had drowned me. This was divine judgement. I was being appraised. My sins were on the scales of evaluation, and I’d lost…

My eyes ripped open and I shot up, breathing heavily, my heart pounding.

I looked around. I was laying on my bed. It was still made, the window open letting a warm afternoon breeze blow the blinds into dancing curls, bobbing and rustling against the moving air, like the memory of someones hair. I immediately questioned the reality of where I was. Was this a dream too? A dream within a dream within a dream? I felt like I’d been lost in another dimension and somehow reappeared, by fluke, into my rightful body.

I was alone. Beside me was a book, open at a page with the headline Sleep Paralysis and Lucid Dreaming. Suddenly, everything came back to me all at once like the memories had been dumped straight back into my brain. I began to laugh, exorcising the last remnants of fear from my body, then I began to wade through the waves and memories of what’d just happened. What did it all mean? The girl, Anu, from my dreams. I’d never seen her before in my life, though she resembled someone I knew. A senior I’d had a crush on. The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and I was jealous of everybody around her. I remember thinking, if I had her to myself, I’d be the happiest man alive. Maybe I’d always felt like that. That if I had someone next to me, I’d be happy. I can no longer remember her name, only the feeling of desiring her.

I rolled over and closed my eyes, and fell into a daydream. I imagined what it would look like, what would be the outcome of my judgement at the end of my days, and I wondered whether humans would ever be able to disassociate happiness from possession.

Maybe it was possible for me to lighten my heart a little before then.