White Rabbit Chapter 21

21.

           

Delores’ eyes were painted like a raccoon’s, or rather, like the heroine she wrote herself to be. She saw herself riding Cleopatra in large mirrored rain drops that fell bizarrely slow, pausing around her as though for her to see her own reflection and be swollen with pride in admiration of herself. She looked fierce and beautiful all at once. But it grew cold suddenly and Cleopatra’s breath billowed from her nose and a fog began to form. The day was gray and sullen. No moon. No sun. Not depressing, rather, without mood. Devoid. Lost in an indescribable absence. The day was an empty feeling, a state of being and Cleopatra’s hooves slogged through puddles with resounding thuds of neither misery nor mirth but like steady drumbeats of a doomed army. Delores thought of the journal her grandmother had given her and couldn’t believe that she had forgotten it. She wrote herself to forget. The thought that she had written everything that she experienced bewildered her, that this life was a composition of her own doing. And in her disorientation, her stomach began to ache and she felt paralyzed. She reached down and grabbed the sword leaving it rest in the sheath to her left holding the handle for confidence. Finding her resolve, she gripped the reigns of the horse just as Woodrow began filching arrows from a sleeve which made a curious sound like the suctioning of a vacuum. He shot them at the large bats that swooped overhead. More vampires. Albino winged demons, they appeared, hissing ominously like fastballs.

More trees. They appeared evil with bare wiry branches that reached into the darkening path as though to snatch Cleopatra for a meal but they were far too slow like old men are too slow, and even move cumbersome in the simplest of movements. They eat wild animals and forest beasts but now they were focused with decrepit eyes upon the travelers, instinctively upon Cleopatra to eat. Sensing the threat herself, Cleopatra began to run and Delores was nearly helpless in the saddle, a paralytic rider, good as dead. But this she didn’t write. This was altered by reality, by logic and reason. The faces of those trees were awful on the trunks, scowling and with fierce open mouths and wild elongated teeth, abysmally barren of leaves, with dead crackling branches like dried-up veins and twisted mangled torsos, bulging noses and a wealth of bumps akin to goiters. They were a far cry from the nobility of oaks. If Delores had to continue herself she wouldn’t have been able, her only strength dispatched to her hand which was gripping the sword. The rest of her was bobbing along until, at last, through the misery of the wicked path and the screaming attack of the vampires and the threats of all else, in a small clearing her feet slipped from the stirrups and she fell from the horse neither alive nor dead. Blood flowed from her and left a black stain in the saddle and her head thumped on the lush grass. The miserable grayness vanished and the sky was clear and perfect. The moon’s silver faint face appeared through the day as big as ever and looked on. Delores lay unconscious as Woodrow attended her. He body, like a corpse, but not convulsing. In her mind she was in her fifteenth year yet again. She was stepping off the train pulling her suitcase along. Déjà vu. The same man who said hello and offered her a taxi the first time said the same thing and was wearing the same Detroit Tigers’ baseball hat. This was her chance to change everything.