I've Had This Dream Before [Fiction]

I’ve had this dream before.

For a thousand years King Minos sent 7 youth and 7 maidens as a feast for the Minotaur, and that year they sent us.

The maidens once straight-spined and tall were crippled at the entrance. The youths were drained of blood, lungs heaving mad. They were promised a ball of string and a sword to lead them out, but in this reality the Minotaur breaks Theseus’ back over his knee and there are no heroes left.

The soldiers prodded us on onward. I choked on the black steps before the labyrinth. I’d been dreaming of this labyrinth since I was a child and its dark corridors whispered to my veins. Whispered: I am beyond reproach and beyond death. I’ve built up an empire in order to silence you, and you’re going to die inside of me.

If he doesn’t get to you first.

I saw you as I turned to catch sunlight for the last time, my grasping fists, sore skin. While the other maidens were shrinking you were smiling. Your skin shone, translucent, luminescent. You had radiant pearls for fingernails.

“Be brave, my baby,” you said.

“I’m too small,” I said.

You touched me on the shoulder and your fingers burned. You tossed your thick black hair over your shoulder and strode ahead. Straight down. I followed after.

I lost you in the hallways of the labyrinth and I grew cold.

The soldiers came for me in the middle of the night. I’d been awake for years waiting for them to arrive. At last, I thought, as they pressed my face down into the dirt and bound me from behind, I don’t have to worry anymore. But even a lifetime of living in the Cold City, underneath the crystal idol of the bull-headed God, could not prepare me for the moment when I walked down those steps. When I crushed under my bare feet the bones of child who died before me.

Baby, I’m so cold.

It’s too dark down there to see, but I knew the labyrinth went on for miles, a webbed tumor that extended out underneath the entire Cold City. Maidens and youth scratched the stone walls with their fingernails, trying to make markings they’d remember. I touched the rough indents their nails left behind, little frantic scratches overlaying little frantic scratches - a network of fever maps.

As children we were taught only two things:
If you want to live you must be a lovely slave.
The only way out through a labyrinth is through the center.

I lost track of time, of course. I imagined the stone walls bearing down on me and I felt as if I was suffocating. I choked on dust as I choked on those black steps. My throat constricted with thirst, and my stomach banged on my ribs. I heard the Minotaur in every scuffle, rat scrabble. Right in front of me. Right behind me. A crystal-skinned, thousand year old monster. The one we built this city for. The monster on every wall. In every picture. In every ceremony. Heaving, heavy, frozen blood and frost eyes.

I started to dream while standing up. I dreamed about my bad childhood, the Minotaur breaking my finger bones with his blunt teeth. I existed in black space and gnarled noise. I dreamed the kind of bitter, half-fever dreams that anxious people dream. I scratched the walls and my fingernails and teeth disintegrated.
I squeezed my body through a funnel, I was being chased by the Minotaur’s crystalline, disembodied feet. I fell down into an abyss and the abyss ate the back of my head. I was never going to get out of this bad place. On the walls of the abyss I was to write for all eternity:

                        Ode to mother, father, sister, lover, Cold City
                                                I am the infection swelling in your legs. 
                                                        They had to cut me out so you could live. 

In the beginning they put me in an iron cradle and they fed me with machines. This is the dystopia you’ve seen in every other dystopia story, a totalitarian theocracy that worships an idol who would demand you destroy yourself for salvation. A Cold City born from the hatred of one human for another, leeching the color out of everything, turning parties into prayer mosques, forcing a cold pipe down your throat to feed you with paste until you gag. Yes, you’ve seen this world before, but this one we made for me. They could’ve fed me to the sickly Romulus and Remus, the wolf children who founded Rome, forced me to bow my head to the French guillotine. In this reality we’ve chosen The Minotaur, and he will represent my terror. He will represent my inability to rest. As there is a labyrinth above, there is a labyrinth below. As there is a labyrinth outside, there is one I’ve swallowed and let grow in my stomach. I am going to live in my dystopia forever because I must learn about THE THING WE FEAR, I must take it to its absolute conclusion. There are things worse than death, my darling, and I’ve found it. This is the freezing dream where I’ve kicked off all the sheets. I run and run.

He will eat me and eat me, because I am loveless and insignificant. Because when I arrived at the center of the labyrinth I find that I’m nothing but an animal who’s been lead down a chute. I have death in one eye and hopelessness in the other. I spit in my hands and the spit is shining and it says “You never find your way out of the dark.”

The Minotaur was not made out of crystal, the god on every skyscraper, but was ragged and covered in dust. He skulked in the corner, shaking and full of old veins, snot caked on his enormous nostrils. He rushed toward me and grabbed me by the throat. He started to crush my windpipe with his grizzled palms. He opened his mouth and roared and it was the sound the machines used to make when I nursed upon them cold, that sharp whistle of air.

But then you came for me.

You arrived at the center of the labyrinth. He dropped me onto the floor where I collapsed, and he reached out to grab you.

You laughed and shook your hair, and he paused, his hoary hands grasping midair. This was a game to you, and the Minotaur a sad player. You were not like the rest of us, stuck in shrinking dreams, chased by horrors. This was not your world, and so you were not afraid.

You saw me broken on the ground and said, “Watch this.”

You ripped open the ceiling with your pearl fingernails, and pulled the sky down. You were radiating, your blood bursting with gold, and the planets were your crown - Mercury, Venus, and Mars - swirling, heated, dipped in your glowing gore.

You touched the Minotaur and he burned alive.

You turned to me sprayed in embers, and you held your hand out to me. I knew when we touched you would not burn me. You pulled me into your warm embrace and told me I could let go.
But I’d been in this labyrinth so long I didn’t know how to leave.

You led me into a deeper sleep.

I tread over the bones of the people the Minotaur had eaten, over his hulking charred body. I grasped the scratched stone walls to climb out of there and my fingers were luminescent blue. They were bloodless and boneless, and I was nothing but skin. I released the walls. You blew on me and I floated upwards.

We floated up together out of the labyrinth. I grasped your hands and held myself close to you. You smelled of stars bursting, of fireworks and ozone.

“I know you,” I said, with what was left of my mouth.

Once in the steel orphanage they didn’t feed us for four days. We were being trained on how to be prisoners, how to drink water from toilet bowls, how to be hopeless. In the daytime we drew labyrinths to remind us of the cruelest way to die. In the nighttime we slept in cribs made of ice. The headmistress told me I was impudent, I had a bad attitude. She beat my back with a cane until I broke and cried, and then left me shuddering on the ground. I was so hungry. I crawled to the corner of the room and while the others were asleep I scratched at the slats, bloodying my fingertips, until I'd pried away the slat and dug into the dirt outside.

It was your hand that pushed its way through the hole, I remember those pearlescent nails, and you held out a mouthful of bread for me to take.

I crammed it into my mouth and bit down on something hard. I spit it up in my hand. You'd stuffed it with a piece of blue crystal.

I’d never been this high up before. From the ground the Cold City was a massive machine, and the crystal bull terrifyingly large. Everytime I looked up I felt nauseous. The charcoal sky could've freezed me from existence. But in the sky the city was a blotted map and The Crystal Bull nothing but a mound of clay. The sky lay on my face warm. I pulled the labyrinth out of my stomach.

"I lost your crystal," I told you, and you kissed me.
We didn't need stones anymore to remind us.

We landed in a valley where the stars were milk and the grass lush beneath us. We ran our fingers through each other's hair. You said, "rest a while here." The stars were rushing into my mouth. Into my skin. I was swallowing them off your tongue. My fingers were blowing away. I was becoming a silhouette in the grass and you folded into my warm skin.
I know that soon this dream will end. Maybe I will wake back in the Cold City, with nothing to remind me of you but the crystal in my pocket. Maybe I won't even have that. I could awaken back in that orphanage with my back bloodied, my drawings of the labyrinth spattered with little broken pieces of me. And when I scratch at the slats you won't come to thrust your hand through the dirt.

Or perhaps I would wake up in a world where I am a god, my skin liquid lush, greens and blues so bright they burn my eyes.

I can't hold on much longer. I am losing my cheeks in the grass. The stars are laying themselves down in a line, burning bright, dying fire. I kiss you but I can't feel your mouth.

I’ve forgotten this is a dream. Our readers will ask us questions. They want to give totality and meaning to this moment. They want us to be together forever. At the end they will wail and throw this story across the room, scratch at the walls. Despise me for not opening my hand to find the crystal once more.

If they give us the totalitarian regime, then they must give us hope. If they destroy the minotaur then it cannot be merely a dream, flickered and gutted out.

Ignore them. We’ve been here before, and there are many dreams to come.
Your smile. Your glowing smile. I want to tell you I’m scared, but I can’t speak. You whisper to me in the starling grass, your breath cool air. You whisper before we dissolve.

Remember that I love you in all places. In all times.
I am here, and the stars are never far away.
Rest with me for a little while longer.

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