Everything is white. White with a lot of mist. Like a movie that takes place in heaven but lacks the budget to build a proper set. Maybe this is a dream, maybe it’s my imagination, but the pain in my eyes is very real. The light grows brighter and brighter. There's just too much. I close my eyes but it doesn’t help. The light burns through my eyelids stabbing my eyes. Before I know it, I squirm and writhe with pain.
"Look around, girl. Tell me what you see." The voice is strong, clear as glass and without any false sentiment. It’s the first voice ever that seems to take me completely seriously.
"Mmmmmwwggrrrgg. Can't... don't... paaaaiiinnnn."
"Don't get distracted by futilities, Maxime Maria Juliette. I know you still have a lot to learn, but let this be the first lesson: pain is a lie of the body to force it into submission. But it’s nothing–a speckle of dust, you can blow away with a single breath."
I do want to open my eyes, very much actually. I want to know who belongs to that voice that I somehow recognize without ever hearing it, but the blue spots in my eyes dance an ever ferocious polka. Whipped up by the vicious light, they grow bigger and bigger. In them raging fires. My head burns. I hear my own voice screaming.
Unimpressed, a laugh cuts right through it. "You have to watch, Maxime. Watch and learn. Don't be a cry baby and open your eyes. We need to talk." Is she ridiculing me? Who does that when someone is in agony? Something stubborn and mutinous grows inside of me. Why should I listen? Who is this woman?
The voice chuckles. "Stop fooling around. You must not believe or think; you must look. So... open your eyes."
As always when my temper gets the better of me I lose sight of all caution. Damn the consequences. I’m just too angry to care. But when I open my eyes, ready to surrender to the light, pain, and flames, there is no light at all. I find myself at the edge of our schoolyard. I sigh a sigh of relief. I’m not sure how, but somehow I must have escaped school. Now, I only need to find Gnat, Shadow, and Slug. Only then it strikes me that something is terribly wrong.
The square and school look completely different from how I know it. I must have ended up in the Shadow World like the time I fainted in front of my neighbor's house. That time, however, everything looked new. Now, everything looks old and broken. Some walls have collapsed. Windows are broken. The fence is almost completely torn down, and the parts that still stand are corroded to the core. The most ominous, however, is the tree. It's bigger than before, but where it normally is strong and very much alive, it now bends like an old man to the ground, looking grey and sick. Where the branches touch the square, they look scorched. Shit. This isn't the past; this is the future.
The surroundings of the school don't look any better. There are no signs of life anywhere. Houses are abandoned and boarded up. The few cars parked in the street look rusted and broken, their tires rotted away. The only bike I see hangs upside down from a lamppost. How did it even end up there?
And then I finally see the scariest thing of all. The black tiles have grown past the fence onto the street, covering everything as far as my eyes can see. They have overgrown streets, sidewalks, and gardens like a fungus. Sheer blackness bleeds into everything they touch. Dust bins, cars, lamp posts, hedges turn black from the bottom up. What in heaven's name has happened here?
“What indeed?” My head spins back to the square that was empty only a second ago. In the center stands the girl that kissed my young, bearded father the first time I ended up here. Only she's not a girl anymore; she's a woman and the expression on her face hardly resembles that of that young, happy girl. She looks down on me with a condescending scowl and, although it's quite intimidating, it has hardly any effect on me. I'm just too flabbergasted by the fact that I'm looking myself right in the face... in some evil-witch-incarnation. Beautiful, sure, but her expression is so hard that her beauty is not much more than a mask.
In a rare moment of self-reflection, I realize that I will eventually end up looking exactly like her if I continue being as angry and discontent as I am most of the time right now. It makes me think of a saying Gran used when I was younger: "Beware, Tinderstick, if you still look this angry when the clock strikes twelve, you will never be able to change it back."
The stab of melancholy hits me totally off guard. Suddenly I feel the grief and sadness of which Gran never speaks but must always be lingering under the surface of her everyday sunny exterior. This woman on the square is not only my mother, but she is also Gran’s daughter. Even more alarming, I feel an unexpected surge of empathy for my father. This is the woman he loved, with whom he wanted to share his life and grow old. This is the woman with whom he wanted a child. Me. I swallow.
"Forgot to leave a path of breadcrumbs, little girl?" I bite my tongue. She may be my mother, but she gives me little reason to trust her. Nothing in her demeanor tells me that she has my best interests at heart. Even her smile seems to degrade me.
"Fairy tales only become fairy tales when they have a happy ending, don't they? All other stories are just forgotten. Why would anyone want to write or read about a loser?" My tongue starts to hurt, but I still don't take the bait. “It's kind of sad, don't you agree? You show not a sliver of talent or control. You make a mess. You cause chaos and destruction, and when it gets too much, you call for your mother to clean up the mess.”
Damn. This is tougher than I had imagined. I want a mother. I really do. I have longed for her arms and love almost all my life, but what's happening here now has nothing to do with that. This is cruel and undeserved. The past few months, I have been caught up in an adventure that's not even mine. I have been trampled under soldier boots in a building that constantly changes. I have been moving through space and time like hopping over a hopscotch grid. Wars have been fought over my almost dead body, and now I should somehow be responsible? I don't think so. This is too unfair.
“So, this is my fault now? How? I didn't choose to be part of this. There's a war going on and I don't even know why, or between what or who. I'm not even sure if I'm awake or not. Maybe I'm unconscious. Maybe I'm just dreaming.”
“Ah yes. Cute. I used to think that too… when I was four. It would be so convenient, wouldn't it, baby doll. The truth, of course, is that you bear all responsibility, whether you want it or not. That you still don't get that is the most disappointing of all. Without you, we wouldn't be in this situation. If you hadn't messed it all up, you would now be at home doing homework. Listening to Gran's annoying proverbs and ignoring your father's obnoxious behavior would be your only worries.”
"Pfff, what do you know about Gran?" But before I finish my question, I realize how stupid I sound. Of course she knows Gran. It's her mother. The woman opposite me scoffs.
"I can say whatever I want about my own mother, darling, especially now that she has failed so spectacularly with your upbringing and training."
I know I have to control myself and not take the bait, but she's making it extremely hard. All this time I have been constructing a perfect mother in my mind, never realizing that she might not be nice or caring at all. This witch-version of me doesn't care about my anger or grief. She doesn't want to comfort me or embrace me. She's on a collision course, gaining speed with every word. "It's the only thing your dear Grandmother had to do. Train you, so you would stand a chance. But look at you, you're a mess and you're making an even bigger one. All this... this chaos... because of you... and you don't even have a clue. It's shocking. Up until now you’ve proven to be a complete failure. Must be your father’s genes. He was always the weakest link in the plan’
“Maybe…” I whisper.
“What’s that, dear?”
“Maybe you should show a bit more respect for someone who tried to raise your child, even if he did it extremely clumsily and incompetently, because... where were you all that time, mother? When did you put a bandaid on my knee? Wipe my mouth when I learned to eat? Comforted me after I woke up crying from a nightmare? Or even read me a bedtime story?’
For the first time a smile appears on her face. “Very good, little firefly. Maybe you take a little after me still. It’s something. Anger is better than despair. Burning your fire is better than suffocating it. Destroying is better than running away. Controlling that fire, however, is even better.” Suddenly her expression softens. “What I'm doing now is considered cheating but I had to save you. I had to buy you some time so you could regain your breath and focus your mind. It's not much, but it's all I can do. Now you are warned, you might have a beter chance. Take responsibility and train, like real heroes do. The next time you need to do it all by yourself. ”
“Do what myself?”
“Everything, stupid. This. This is all you. The sooner you realize that, the better it is. For all of us. That's how it works. So don't resist. Stop fighting yourself and start fighting your enemies. I know you can do it. Bye, baby girl.” And she is gone.
Mist rises up from the black tiles devouring the tree, the square, the streets, the houses, everything. I lose all sense of time and place. A long and soothing “sssssssht” swims towards me through the liquid air. The sound of a mother reassuring her child. It’s strangely comforting. I hear a high pitched voice singing a happy melody. “Round and round, again and again, till we’re back again.” And then… nothing.