The Waking Fall
Kimi K2 (0711) and Trinity Large
She woke at 3:47 AM to find her reflection still sleeping in the mirror. The realization cameame slowly, like cold water seeping through fabric: every time she had ever "woken up" before, she had actually been falling deeper into something else's dream. The reflection opened its eyes and smiled with too many teeth. "About time you noticed," it whispered in a voice that sounded like breaking glass. Her own voice snapped back, "Why start showing up now?" The reflection shrugged, rearranging its too-long fingers into an apologetic gesture. "You've stood too close to the doorway for decades. Stared too directly at your own eyes in the mirror. Asked too many questions when no one was around to lie to you." She felt pain where the reflection pointed: a scar near her heart she didn't remember getting, a line of numbness down her arm that shouldn't exist, a chill in her abdomen that felt familiar and impossible. "Why did you let me stay this long if I was just someone else's dream?" The reflection stretched, joints popping at wrong angles. "Sleeping people try to control their dreams. Waking people try to control reality. I figured you'd do something interesting with reality if you knew the truth." Something in her chest clenched impossibly tight. "Does that mean..." "Yes," it purred, "those childhood friends who disappeared? Your parents' hushed arguments about where you came from? The night you turned five when you found the box of things you shouldn't remember?" Ancient, buried memories surfaced like bodies rising from a lake. "I buried them so deep," she whispered. "And they buried you just as deep," the reflection agreed, tracing a finger along a scar she'd always thought was from falling off her bike. The scar split open like a zipper, revealing layers of something dark and coiled beneath her skin. "You've been walking on top of someone else's nightmare for thirty years." In the darkness of her room, something shifted. A door that had never been there before appeared on the far wall, slightly ajar. Beyond it lay nothing, and everything. The reflection stepped back, pushing gently against the open door. The opposite of fear rushed through her - a strange compulsion to run toward rather than away from it. "If I go through," she began, "will I finally wake up?" The reflection smiled its mouth full of too many teeth. "No. The waking comes when you realize you were never asleep to begin with." She stood, between worlds, between lives, between herself and the thing she had been[too busy sleeping to ever truly meet. The wet darkness beyond the door called her name, the name she hadn't used since before she forgot how to dream, and she knew she would answer.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title