Chapter 3
Monday, the word corrupted from moon-day, the second day of the week, when the powers of original creation still linger in the air. Sunday was powerful for primary causes, but Monday, Monday was the day of power for those things contrary to normality.
The Glass was one such thing.
So much blood, and so pure. So...available. Where there was life, there was always blood, but not so cooperative, not so willing. The dim glint of the television shined like the teeth of a child-molesting clown. The Glass knew compulsion; the Glass was compulsion, but this was like it's human embodiment. For once, even the Glass felt compelled.
Hell, someone had even gone through the trouble of tying the girl's right arm behind her back this time.
There was a different knife. There was different blood. In this world, the Glass was omnipresent. The hand, the foot, and the eye were always with the girl. The plate was a stretch, but the power of this day was close enough to suffice.
The girl's eye opened, but the rest of the body was held in place. This time, there was no need to move, although there was no real capacity for movement. The glint of one shining surface touched the glint of the shining eye, and the dream began...
In Caroline's dream, she was lying on a bench, surrounded by the scent of roses. She tried to sit up, but she found herself wrapped in thorny vines. She opened her eyes, and the center of her vision was filled with a huge, pink rose, the size of a large man's widespread hand.
The flower retreated from her face, and she could see that a single thorny vine supported it. The flower acted like an eye mounted on a tentacle, scanning her body from head to toe. Like a breeder inspecting a newly acquired purebred, the petals of the flower gently touched her naked body.
Caroline noticed that despite being wrapped in sharp brambles, she hadn't been pricked by a single thorn.
As if satisfied with its acquisition, the flower retreated again. Surprisingly, painlessly, the vines encapsulating Caroline gently constricted and pulled her into a sitting position.
In her new seated posture, Caroline could see an endless field, every inch of which was covered by the creeping vine. Smaller pink roses in various states of bloom studded the ground. The large bloom was suspended off the earth like a rearing cobra, the petals spread like the hood of the snake as it stared at her eyelessly. In total, it was raised five feet above the ground, just slightly above eye level.
In her right ear, Caroline heard a rustling of dry leaves. The rustle grew louder and louder, like a ten year old walking through a gutter in the fall. She tried to turn her head to see what was making the noise, but the vines tightened around her.
For the first time in this dream, Caroline could feel the thorns.
The giant pink rose reared back, as if to strike. Caroline's eyes widened in irrational horror at its vegetable anger. Just as the vine was about to attack, a slender black rope whipped around the flower, like a lasso on a young calf.
Before the rope could wrestle the vine to the ground, brown withering death spread along the vine, turning its verdant expanse into dry brush. The thorns around Caroline's neck sharpened, then suddenly released as the vines that held them instantaneously turned into dusty twigs.
As Caroline tried to stand, she woke up...
...Only to find she was naked, and strapped to the couch. Todd's couch. And Berry was asleep, with her head resting in Caroline's lap. On the coffee table across from Caroline was a mostly empty IV bag containing the dregs of an entire pint of blood.
As Caroline looked around the room, she felt a dry, crackling sensation from her mouth all the way down her chest and onto her stomach. As a kid Caroline had often covered her hand in glue, let it dry, and the flexed her hand, feeling the dry, brittle glue crack and split as fresh air touched her suffocated skin. It felt like that, only less dramatic.
Looking at her restraints, she saw only her right dominant side was strapped to the arm rail of the cheap futon she'd spent the night on. Under the couch, she felt her right leg similarly bound. Her left hand and foot were unrestrained.
It took a clumsy minute, but Caroline was able to unhook the bulky chrome buckles on her glossy black leather restraints left-handed. The more she moved, the more crackling she felt. Tiny bits of whatever was caked on her face and chest fell into her lap like Greek baklava pastry without the syrup.
Caroline ran her hand over her breastbone to brush whatever it was that had dried on her. Only when she brought her hand up to see what was on it did she realize what it was: dried blood. Dried blood covered Caroline from chin to navel in a pattern of dribbles from the sides of her mouth like a thinner, more sinister kind of candle wax.
Now free to move, she gently pushed Berry's face out of her lap, trying not to wake her in what, according to the light in the window, was predawn sleep. However, she encountered more of that strange, crackling resistance.
Unlike Caroline, Berry's angelic sleeping face was covered from forehead to the point of her chin, the entirety of which was glued by the protein rich blood to the tops of Caroline's thighs. Still warm and dreamy from the afterglow, Berry's face slipped from her lap onto the couch without waking.
Not certain if she was still in some kind of freakish dream, Caroline's demeanor became almost ethereal as she wandered into Todd's small bedroom towards his bathroom. Pale white and naked except for the dried blood, she looked down at the bed to see both Raz and Todd shirtless with huge bruises on the insides of their left arms. Todd's chest was still carved with Caroline's name. Raz's chest was devoid of tattoos, but patterned with old deep scars, many of which spelled "Berry" in various styles and calligraphy. Some of them were not so old, but still disturbingly deep.
Todd's Panasonic clock/radio/alarm read 5:26 AM in harsh red letters. Plenty of time to take a shower, put on last night's clothes, eat breakfast, and make it to work on time, her half sleeping brain told her. Reflexively, and with uncharacteristic grace, Caroline slid behind the shower curtain and eased up the hot water. The cut on her left hand had scabbed up tight and clean, but otherwise the warm sudsy water failed to reveal any fresh physical damage on her skin despite all the blood.
Enraptured in sauna-like ecstasy, Caroline felt a soft set of exploratory lips on her lower back. Reaching behind her to pull Todd's face closer to her own, her hand instead found Berry's long locks. Still sleepy, Caroline rested her hand on Berry's head as her lips slid over Caroline's slight love-handles towards her navel as Berry eased into the shower with her.
"Hey Carl," Berry whispered in Caroline's left ear after her still bloody face slid between Caroline's humble breasts and across her neck. Only the sharp digging of Berry's nails into her right shoulder grounded Caroline to reality as the memory of last night's escapade returned to her.
Not Todd. Berry. But Caroline had never had a lesbian experience before. Why now?
Berry wriggled her face into Caroline's neck like a suckling kitten, using the friction of flesh on soapy flesh to soften and remove the blood from the night before. Berry recounted to Caroline in a lover's whisper what they had done earlier. How Berry had strapped Caroline to the couch while she had been sleeping, how she'd held her slumbering eyes open with scotch tape and forced Caroline to watch as she tapped Todd and Raz's veins to fill the pint bag with fresh blood, how Berry had forced Raz and Todd out of the room, how she had punctured the bag with an ornamental knife and forced Caroline to drink, how erotic Caroline had become once she'd tasted the blood, how she had writhed in ecstasy as Berry poured blood over her face and breasts, how Berry had fallen asleep licking salty blood from Caroline's body as Caroline pushed Berry's head hard between her legs...
It's times like these that make it a real bitch when the hot water runs out.
At 6:30 Monday morning Berry was dressed in silk pajamas and fast asleep on the couch again, but this time deliciously clean. Caroline slipped into worn New Balance shoes Jaleesa had picked out after her squeamish incident yesterday and strolled down the stairs like a jolly sailor who'd just gotten lucky the night before to look where Berry had parked her car.
Thirty minutes to get home, thirty minutes to change and eat, and another thirty to squeak into work on time. Normally Caroline's biological clock left her a couple of minutes late, but these days she was feeling more and more in tune with the cyclical nature of things going on around her.
Stepping into her apartment for the first time since her incident, she was glad to be alone with her embarrassment. Compared to last night, there was hardly any blood spilled at all. Looking at the state of the place, it was pretty clear she owed Jaleesa lunch, though.
Jaleesa stumbled into work sixteen minutes late with Caroline pulling the Cheshire cat face at her from over the top of the front desk.
"What's got you in such a great mood?" demanded Jaleesa grumpily. She'd spent the last night dealing with her oldest son's baby mama drama.
"Well, mainly I'm just happy I've got the kind of friends that would wash the blood off my sheets while I bang some hot guy I'd just met that weekend," said Caroline in a voice that sounded like a female version of Frank Sinatra.
"Yeah, well, friends like that don't exactly come cheap. For example, you owe me lunch...." countered Jaleesa.
"No problem..."quipped Caroline a little too fast.
"Wait! I'm not even CLOSE to finished yet," Jaleesa continued, "...at Red Lobster. AND you're doing all the wreathes for Reverend Johnson's funeral."
"The Johnson Funeral?! But Reverend Johnson had a congregation of over two thousand!" whined Caroline in a voice that sounded a lot more like her old self. Jaleesa smiled a bit, happy to have taken a little wind out of Caroline's sails.
"That reminds me. Here's the orders on it we've gotten so far. And yes, at least five of them want a Bible laminated to the backboard opened to a specific verse. You know how nuts they go when you mark the wrong one. And notice how I said 'you' and not 'we,'" said Jaleesa.
Sometimes, no matter how crazy your weekend was, it's still Monday when you wake up.