I want to look (inside) and see that the (centre) leads to a different world. A kaleidoscope of a world. And in that world is a brand spanking new. A diamond chrysalis. (inside) the chrysalis is another world that has been eating up the dreams of someone who wants the world to be good to them. That centre, hard and shiny and cutting at a touch so red blood washes over. (inside), in the (centre), is that soft, sweet, can’t get at it to eat, nub of essence of those dreams.
The blood washes over, down and around the points of the diamond to petals, because the chrysalis is the (centre) of THAT flower. Yes. THAT flower. Get it out of my face, the engineer said. I can’t build that vulgar. But he had to suck it up and build because nature is urgent, is dire, can’t wait for nothing. So in the (centre), yes of THAT flower, sits a chrysalis.
It’s a sight fore sore eyes.
Before.
Afore.
Foretune.
And ain’t these eyes sore. In a cry—a REAL cry only two tears because water is hard and hard to take so it burns— kind of way. But this is a sight (inside) a (centre).
It’s not like nobody tried to get at it, them soft, chewy dreams. But it cuts so that this vulgar flower is now a red vulgar flower, enriched by those oxygenated erythrocytes. I call it the Flame because that other name chokes up in my throat. Blood Rose tastes dusty like I’ve been sweeping in a circle instead of out the door. This Flame, I’ve seen it. In a shell that was small with a cue that was curly and a cut down the back to see into the world where the chrysalis sits (inside) the (centre) of THAT flower.
That Flame and that chrysalis. A blade. Leave it alone; I’ve got the scars to prove. And don’t bother with tongs, it’ll cut then too. Even the crane. I heard a man bled out like that once. Even if you can get a really big shell and go through the chip in the back. That’s how I did it, a crawl with a kind of snake and wiggle to get that fatty through.
It was (inside) a room but not the (centre). It’s a kinda-nice-like room. Like a closet, can only fit two people at a time, three if you’re lucky and they’re small-ish. Four, if you stack them like children. And wallpaper like Morris but haunted, by something like dehydrated fish. All that flaky scaly dandruff. Salted and dropping from the ceiling, like when I don’t wash my hair for months. Dry, built up, flakes falling to polka dot my black nightie.
(centre) your thoughts on what it is like to bite a shark. Rub your nerves with sandpaper, break a tooth on a fly. This dream-selective plaque membrane. Dreams in. None out. Doh give dat [REDACTED] chile none. Left are the dreams of someone to whom the world is ungood, which is not bad just bad adjacent.
Enough to flush your pores. Watch those pustules float away.
Where is the time? In here, it’s not. Probably somewhere over there. There being a place I don’t know that’s connected to here unless the time can teleport which, let’s be honest, it likely can. So there is an absence of time, not an absence of motion. You would think that motion needs time, but apparently it doesn’t, this contradiction that we think is a contradiction is actually just how things work.
I came away from that room salty and bruised and bleeding in and out. That’s how everyone comes away. That’s if they come-away-at-all. The bleeding proportional to the attempt: cranes, machines, other etceteras, the less you are to come-away-at-all. Though there’s no bodies in there. No one knows where they go or who takes them, maybe Time. Even if you’re in the room with an entity that tries too hard, you just don’t know. But I didn’t try all that hard. I figured that if I could touch it, I would touch it. I want that mind where there’s dreams of joy, but if I was disappeared because I’d bled a little too much, I couldn’t enjoy it, now could I?
I’ve given up now. Maybe. I still follow the journals reporting the mathematics of the room. There’s two of them. Journal of the Room and The Existence We Cannot Compute. One’s more of the theoretical. The other’s more of an experimental collection of counternarratives about the room. Useful to those trying to touch the (centre).
I don’t know why anyone else wants to touch the (centre). Money can’t be worth certain death or injury. Me? I just want my dreams. Yes. They’re my dreams in THAT mushy (centre) hard as diamond. Just my dreams. Not them other folk’s dreams. But no one believes me when I tell them. “Can’t be your dreams,” an Edifice of a Marginal Lens told me once. “Can’t be your dreams. They’re no one’s dreams. If they were your dreams, you’d be able to tell us what the dreams are and we wouldn’t be risking death for them.”
Can’t argue with a good bit of incomplete logic.
I don’t know what the dreams are because as soon as I dream them, the (centre) sucks them (inside). But I know that I dreamt them and that they’re my dreams because the flower says so. It’s part of those dreams I do remember. The ones of pain and stress and suffering. I’ve seen it right before; it looks at me, shrugs leaves and shakes a petal as though the damn bastard thing is sorry about taking away another happiness.
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Isana Skeete (none/they) is an ace non-binary Black author based in Florida. Isana’s writing has been published in hex literary, OFIC Magazine and Strange Horizons.