Aftershock & Others Read Free Page A

away from the window, sobbing, retching, running blindly for the stables I call home.
     
    Awake again.
    Back in my Elysian fields, but still I cannot shake off the effects of the nightmare. The dream-Maria’s words have roused memories in my waking mind. They are partly true.
    How could I have forgotten?
    There was a murder. Karl’s rich uncle. And I was accused. I remember now…remember that night. I was supposed to meet Karl at the house. He was going to introduce me to his uncle and bring our love out into the open at last. But when I got there, the door was open and a portly old man lay on the floor, bleeding, dying. I tried to help him but he had lost too much blood. Then the Burgomeister’s men arrived and found me with the slain man’s blood on my hands and the knife that had killed him at my feet.
    And Karl was nowhere to be found.
    I never saw Karl again. He never came to visit me. Never answered my notes. In fact, his barrister came to the jail and told me to stop writing to Karl—that Karl didn’t know who I was and wanted nothing to do with the murderer of his uncle.
    No one believed that I knew Karl. No one but his sister Maria had ever seen us together, and Maria said I was a complete stranger. I remember the final shock when I was told that Maria wasn’t his sister at all.
    After that the heart went out of me. I gave up. I lost the will to defend myself. I let them do with me as they wished. My only request was that my body be given to the medical college. That was my private joke on the regents—I would be attending the university after all.
    I remember walking to the gallows. I remember the rope going around my neck. After that…
    …I was here. So I must have been saved from execution. If only I could remember how. No matter. It will come. What does matter is that since arriving here my life has been a succession of one blissful day after another. Perfect…
    Except for the dreams.
    But now clouds gather over my Elysian fields as I remember Karl’s betrayal. I’d thought he avoided me in order to protect his family name, but the dream-Maria’s words have not only awakened my memory, they’ve shed new light on all the things that happened to me after that night I went to Karl’s uncle’s house.
    The clouds darken and thunder rumbles through the distant mountain passes as my anger and suspicion grow. I don’t know if Karl lied and betrayed me as the dream-Maria said, and I don’t know if he was the one who killed his uncle, but I do know that he deserted me in my hour of most dire need. And for that I will never forgive him.
    The clouds obscure the sun and darken the sky, the storm threatens but it doesn’t rain. Not yet.
     
    The nightmare again.
    Only this time I don’t fight it. I’m actually glad to be in this monstrous body. I’m a curious thing. Not a seamless creature, but a quilt of human parts. And powerful. So very powerful. My years of farm work left me strong for a girl, but I never had strength like this. Strength to lift a horse or knock down a tree. It feels good to be so strong.
    I head for Maria’s cottage.
    She’s home. She’s alone. Karl is nowhere about. I don’t bother knocking. I kick down the door and step inside. Maria starts to scream but I grab her by the throat with one of my long-fingered hands and choke off all sound. She laughed at me last night, called me stupid. I feel the anger surge and I squeeze tighter, watching her face purple. I straighten my arm and lift her feet off the floor, let them kick the empty air, just as she said mine did in the dream-death she watched. I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, watching the blood vessels burst in her eyes and face, watching her tongue protrude and turn dusky until she hangs in my hand like a doll. I loosen my grip and shake her but she remains limp.
    What have I done?
    I stand there, shocked at the rage within me, at the violence it makes me capable of. For a moment I grieve for Maria, for myself, then I shake