The Pull of The Glowing Red

From her bedroom window, the night sky, a watercolor painted by nature, dazzled her eyes as Rena drifted off to sleep

She awoke, from her point of view, almost immediately in a strange yet familiar place. As a cloud drifted towards her, shrouding her in its cotton-candy, white majesty, she noted the moon was closer than it was before she closed her heavy eyelids.

How she got there, she did not immediately know. Too quick to give into the vivid dreamworld she awoke in, she instead swam through the air as if it were an ocean or that little lake she would so often dip her toes in with Charlie. "Oh, Charlie-boy." she muttered tearfully to no one and all of the night sky.

As she allowed her eyes to gaze across the stretch of starlit sky around her, she could see in the distance a glowing red light. It was calling out to her. Beckoning her. She felt compelled to swim across the glittering dark expanse she found herself floating in, to get closer to it.

The closer she swam, the stronger she felt its magnetic pull. She was a slave to its power. Whatever the glowing red was, she was going to find out.

Swimming with a smile as fireflies filled the earth beneath her, she marvelled at how peaceful it was. Up there, in the dominion of the birds.

As the glowing red grew, the closer she got, she felt the core of the fantastical twilight illumination looking back at her, as if it had eyes, a heart, and lungs. She blinked, swore it vibrated, but dismissed it as a trick of the bright light.

There was a song in the night sky, on the gentle breeze.

"365 degrees" were the only words she could make out. But as the soothing rhythm of the dreamworld began to falter, a quiet unease crept in.

Fly swimming closer and closer to the beacon, the glowing red, she couldn't stop herself. Too entranced she was to notice the fires that were licking at the edges of her nightdress as it shimmied through the sky. She was too blinded by the light, too overcome with the song's rhythm and beat, to pull away. Even as she felt a growing sense of unease.

"365 degrees... burning down the house"

A tight knot twisted in her stomach, but still, she couldn't stop herself. The song, the light, the pull—it felt like fate.

The shape of a once-solid, now decaying, burning house came into sharp focus, she remembered the source of the glowing red. She was transported back there, to that house, that bedroom. Listening to her favourite song, as her family's screams were drowned out by the new wave, arty funk of her happy place.

It wasn’t her fault, she knew that. Counselors had said so, time and again. But guilt consumed her—just like the flames that had consumed her family home. Music was no longer her happy place, but a painful reminder.