porch light

I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, the void stretching loud and tempting below me. It’s a very nice cliff, the cinematic kind; everything is a sort of wintry grey, the face is sheer, the drop is long, and fog swirls around under my feet.

Beside me, her legs dangling out in the nothingness, sits a girl. She has no name, so I don’t bother to ask.

Beautiful is almost the word for her, this nameless girl in my dream, but not really. She is something a step past it, something with a little more awe and a little more power that no one has ever made a word quite wide enough for. I think she is the cliff face, the view and the mist and the drop, and the intake of breath just before you jump. She is impossible to understand without falling headfirst into her.

On her shoulder, there is a bird: a barn owl, Tyto alba, the first bird my mother taught me to identify. The bird’s name is Spark, which is also my name, but I bled for this name and the bird was born with it. The bird is real and the girl is real, but I am not. I am a metaphor.

In the dream at the edge of the cliff, I have a rock in my hand. It isn’t a very large rock, just about the right size for my hand, and I am holding it like I’m about to skip it across the mist because it is far too important to throw. There is something about this cliff that calls for ruination.

The rock is not a metaphor. It has my blood on it.

“We have to jump,” says the girl without a name. I look at her but also through her because she and the cliff behind her are the same stardust in different shapes. She is the part of falling just before you hit the ground.

The owl says, “You shouldn’t have named me after her.”

The blood on the rock is also on me, and the ground. Nameless eyes trace the edges of me, drinking me in as if I am a fading silhouette.

“I know,” the girl with no name says.

Then she jumps, and the bird goes with her. She fades easily into the mist, home with the stars that made her.

I do not see the bird hit the ground, but I feel the spray of its blood across my chest.

The girl with no name is the fall, and I am the sharp rocks at the bottom.

After that, I have other dreams. None of them are as interesting, or unnerving, or memorable. None of them creep into the edges of my mind the next day and make me tip to the side during history class and doodle mismatched flowers instead of notes.

I tried to write her once, the girl with no name. There aren’t any words strong enough to hold her stardust. I got as far as she is the feeling of falling before my mind imploded and I fell prey to the memory of the dream.

What I did manage was the owl. I wrote, obsessively, the parts and pieces of the owl. I drew lines between the owl and myself and back again. A week ago, I taught myself to draw barn owls and carpeted my room in failed sketches until my mother told me to please clean them up. I didn’t realise until I tried to draw it that the bird in my dream has something wrong with it, with the shape of its wings and the colour of its eyes. The bird, like the nameless girl, is drifting pieces of starlight.

My most recent barn owl looks more like the one in my dream, the one with the slightly-off wings. I pinned it to my corkboard this morning– my corkboard, which is sitting on the floor because it never stays on its hook. I haven’t shown it to anyone yet; it isn’t quite right. There isn’t enough of me in it.

Tonight, I think, I will dream of her again.

I drive home alone in the dark, my fingers tapping against the wheel as I trace the familiar route from the library to my house. This late, there is nothing on the radio except people talking, so I let the silence fold over me and imagine what it would be like if I weren’t alone. If I glance to the side, I might even catch a glimpse of her there- a girl made of falling and living and mist, a dream with as much claim on my waking hours as the streetlamps flashing past.

I turn off the freeway, locking my doors with a flick of my hand at the first red light. There are no good parts of town anymore.

My house is empty and silent when I park, and I slide my keys between my fingers before I even unlock the car. I sprint the short distance from the curb to the door, hurry my way through the bolt and the doorknob until I am inside and the doors are locked and finally, it feels safe. Letting out a long breath, I creep through the house to the kitchen to hang up my keys.

Through the kitchen window, I see– the porch lights are on.

The porch lights are my mother’s favourite thing, her special aesthetic fairy lights, exclusively to be used when she has work friends over. She can’t have had work friends over tonight, because it’s a Wednesday and she has a shift at two tomorrow morning. I only go to the library on Wednesday evenings so she can get more sleep.

So there’s no reason for the lights to be on. I idle by the window for a moment before moving over to the back door. The switch for the porch lights is just outside the door, which is locked and bolted.

If I open the door for just a moment and reach out to the edges of my feet... I can switch them off without really leaving the protection of the house. It’s possible.

As I twist the bolt, I catch a flash of movement outside and freeze, dropping the lock back into place. Of course there’s someone out there. How else could I explain the lights? They connect to an outdoor switch and everything. This whole thing was probably a creepy plot to get me or my mother to leave the house.

Carefully, I tiptoe back over to the window and peek out, doing my best to hide my face behind the fruit-pattern curtain. Outside, under the fairy lights... there is a bird, perched on the arm of my least favourite lawn chair.

A barn owl. Tyto alba. For a moment, I see an image of a girl in the seat beside it, a girl without a name, and I feel like falling just imagining her there.

The bird wobbles on the chair. There’s something wrong with its wings, or just one of them, because it stretches them out but doesn’t take off. I narrow my eyes as the owl spreads its wings a second time.

They’re the wrong shape for barn owl wings, wrong in exactly the same way as the drawing pinned to my corkboard.

Before I can think, I’m at the door again, clicking the locks open and swinging it open quickly- too quickly. I realise a second too late that I’ll scare the bird off with movements this sudden.

But the bird hasn’t moved. It still stares at me from its perch with strangely sentient eyes.

There is a dishtowel in my hand; I have no idea how it got there, but I appreciate past me’s foresight as I wrap it carefully around my forearm and extend it carefully towards the bird. It doesn’t react, just shifts its talons on the chair’s arm.

It has a name, I remember. My name.

“Spark.”

It comes, immediately. I brace myself but I am still not fully ready, not for the sudden weight or the silence of its flight or even the soft brush of its talons against my skin. The dishtowel is nowhere near enough protection against those claws; I wonder, somewhere, how much falconer’s gloves cost and if they have free shipping.

“Remember,” the bird says, and oh! I must be dreaming again. “Remember, when the time comes, that you are the last mortal part of her.”

“I am a metaphor,” I say to the bird with my name, and suddenly its talons feel like fingers, like the hands of the girl without a name. I think she smells like rain.

“You are the metaphor,” the bird says, and then it is not there anymore and I am just standing on my back porch with a dishtowel wrapped around my arm.

I reach out and switch off the porch lights with one hand, dropping a curtain of darkness that I spend no time enjoying. As soon as the door is locked, I switch on the kitchen light to blink the last of the vivid daydream away.

“I must need more sleep,” I find myself mumbling as I unwrap the dishtowel and sling it over the oven handle.

Except- the middle of the dishtowel is shredded, sliced cleanly in a pattern I can easily recognise as the talons of the bird I recently imagined myself holding.

Barn owl, my brain supplies. Tyto alba.

I am a metaphor.

I throw the towel in the trash can and hurry to bed.