pebbled moonlight

She woke in the dark.  

        Not with a start; not hopelessly entangled in the bedsheet-arms of concocted peril; not covered in a cold sweat.  The dreams had become far too routine to merit so grandiose a finale as that, anymore.  Same unfamiliar house; same flight from the same intangible horror, through the same field of shoulder-high grass that left her legs in crimson, burning tatters but her clothing untouched; same eerily swinging picture window, through which could be seen the same idyllic craggy ocean view, and accompanied by the same nauseating acceptance that the knife grasped purposefully in her right hand would not prevent her destruction.  Same sharks.  She had never understood the sharks.  The only thing that ever changed was the knife.  Last night, it had been long, notched and grooved as from hacking through bone.  She blamed the cold Chinese food at 1 AM.

         A yawn momentarily dampened the staccato of rain to a single tone.  4:32.  Later than usual.

         The sharks never killed anyone.  Just circled nonchalantly, drifting wherever the next bend of their sinuous bodies cared to take them.  It was safe to assume that it was the same sinuous, nonchalant, carefree direction every night; but four feet of glassy blue between them and her stripped away the tedium that plagued the rest of the nightly agenda.  Their presence baffled her.  Their freedom rankled.

         X-Acto, tonight.  Under the pebbled moonlight, she felt a dampness where her hands had clung to the blankets.  She let her eyelids drop, as she had every night for months, to recapture that one blessed instant of variability that her mind, long atrophied with the ennui of dependable grasses and sharks, might turn over, analyze; explore every crevice in search of meaning.

         She was back in the unfamiliar, unsurprising house, then.  The picture window moaned its siren song, mistakenly unlocked and yawning horridly agape in time with every unfamiliar door and unsurprising window in her nightly abode.  And she knew, fumbling for the knife with the grotesque practiced air of a marionette, that the beautiful scene of cliffs and wildflowers and waves, now halved by the picture window's frame, was another paralyzing death doled out by a faceless killer.  She grabbed the wrong end of the X-Acto, slicing a tidy V into the palm of her right hand.  The simple letter blossomed into illumination with swelling beads of ruby.

         Her eyelids crept back up as a matter of formality.  That…that was new.  That was interesting.  She shifted in bed, pulling her knees to her chest and gazing out at the moon.  Raindrops frayed its edges while she savored her latest pearl, running her fingertips along one of the ridged scars that dashed up her legs.