Prologue:
As she held the revolver, she thought of how friendly it seemed. It held a strong yet peaceful beauty in every inch of its dark steel. “This could be my answer,” she thought, “This could be my way out.” Yet again she was struck by how eerily inviting the idea of pulling the trigger was. How she would love to silence all the secrets and fears she held within. She had sat there, on the master bedroom floor, caressing the gun every day after school or work for the past two weeks, except on Mondays. Her brother was there on Mondays. She wasn’t sure why, but he couldn’t see this; he couldn’t know. That would make her weak, somehow. That would make her less.
It wasn’t that she was afraid of him telling – they never ratted each other out. They had an un-spoken agreement that bordered on the edges of close friendship; he wouldn’t have told if he found out, they were siblings.
It was that she didn’t want her little brother knowing that she got like this. She didn’t want her little brother seeing the scared, angry, and lost girl she’d become. That was the only thing in the world that frightened her. Letting her brother down. That’s why no one ever saw her cry. She had to be strong, for her brother. It was her job, her responsibility, to be there for him – God knew their parents wouldn’t be.
She hadn’t always been like this – she knew that. She had been happy before… before The Changing. That’s how she always thought of it, The Changing. Not as “the split” or “the divorce.” It was more than that. A split was peaceful. A divorce made sense. What she’d lived through was The Changing. It was a dark time, and it would never end… But it was secret, it was safe – she always kept the secrets safe.
“I never told anyone,” she whispered bitterly, “and now I’m paying for it with my honesty, my joy, and my innocence. Now I’m paying with my soul.”
Then in her mind, as she looked at the gun, she thought hysterically, “Did I make you proud? Am I good enough now that my soul is empty?!? Is this the daughter you wanted? One who only sticks around for Danny?!? Well it’s the daughter you made me into. Thanks guys, thanks to hell.”
And as she brought the revolver to her temple, cocked it, and put her finger to the trigger, the door opened. There, framed by the lighted hallway, stood her brother, Danny, motionless. She only thought one thing as she took it all in, just two words – “Oh hell.”
Then the revolver fired. She was dying… but… no! Something was wrong! She wasn’t dying – her brains hadn’t plastered the room – although there was blood everywhere. The room was a sea of red, and she was slowly falling away from the surface. She found herself clawing towards consciousness – she had to tell Danny! To explain!
But no. Her last picture before red imploded into black was of her brother, unfrozen, and running towards her. Her last picture was of a confused, brave, twelve-year-old boy trying to stand by a friend; trying to fight the demons with her. Then all pictures were gone. Thought blanked out and floated away, and there was nothing and everything all at once. There was no tunnel, no light – but there were all tunnels and all light! It was too much – she couldn’t handle the Overflowing Void that had invaded her very being… Then kind darkness descended, and glorious nothing-ness embraced her. For the first time in years, Alex was at peace.
Chapter 1, Part 1:
She could smell the hospital – she didn’t have to open her eyes to know that was where she was. She hurt like hell.
“Is that really very surprising after you tried to blow off your own head?” asked a matter-of-fact, cynical voice in the back of her mind. It hurt too much to respond to it. She felt like someone had dropped a delivery-truck off the Empire State Building, and it had landed on her head.
Then there was another voice; a scared, pleading voice that came, not from her head, but right beside her. As she began to crawl towards awareness, she started to make out what it said. “It’s Danny!” she realized, stunned as she heard her younger brother’s words. He was praying.
“Please God,” said the twelve-year-old, “I know I’ve been bad about praying, and that I haven’t gone to church every Sunday, but please, give me back my sister. I know she thinks she has to be strong for me, but, if you give her back, I promise I’ll be strong for her and take care of her, and I promise I’ll never throw spitballs at the bathroom ceilings anymore… and I’ll even eat cheese every day! Anything to get her back!”
Alex tried to stifle her giggle at the remark on cheese – her brother hated cheese with a passion most people believed a pre-teen to be incapable of. But Danny heard her, and as he jumped up in surprise, Alex opened her eyes… only to find that her left eye remained sightless. “Oh no,” she thought, filling with dread, “don’t tell me I blew out my eye.”
Her hand flew to her face – there was wet, sticky gauze all around the left side of it, with eye and ear buried somewhere beneath.
“This isn’t real,” she whispered, to herself more than to Danny, “I’m dreaming… I’ll wake up any second now…” But she knew this was real – horror was surreal and distant in dreams, but she could taste her terror in this perception of reality.
She looked at Danny with one haunted eye, and broke down. Sobs tore through her, setting the left side of her head on fire, sending spears of pain and shock throughout her nervous system. Then Danny was hugging her, everything went black a second time, and once again Alex rested.
Though she did not know it, Danny stayed with her all the while – sleeping only when his eyes betrayed him, eating only when their parents brought food. Danny forsook school, friends, and soccer in his seemingly never-ending vigil, and never gave it a second thought. After all, how many times had Alex watched him as he slept off the flu or equally un-pleasant things? Anyway, they were siblings, and they were allies. This was what they did for each other. So he waited.

Chapter 1, Part 2:
Three days later, Alex woke up again. She had passed in and out of conscious thought throughout the three days, never touching the surface so much that people noticed. As soon as she fully woke though, she realized something – “Oh my God. They’ll stick me in a nuthouse… Without Danny!” It was her worst nightmare come true – she couldn’t be there for Danny.
It wasn’t even just that he needed her to be there for him – she knew that, if it was necessary, Danny could get by okay without her – he was a smart kid. She needed him to need her. Otherwise… otherwise the world would end, at least hers would. She couldn’t let them take her away from Danny, no matter what happened. She had to stay with her brother. It was as simple as that.
He’d been asleep in the chair next to her bed when she came to. She’d simply watched him sleep – until her mother came screeching and crying in, anyway.
“Lord! Sometimes that woman is like a cat with laryngitis trying to sing opera!” thought Alex, feeling rather agitated. At his mother’s ear-splitting tears of “joy,” Danny had jumped awake mumbling something along the lines of: “I didn’t take the shoelace, I swear!” Only to see it was just his mother, and then slowly realize that her noisy rejoicing must mean Alex was either awake, or waking up, and he slowly turned toward her hospital bed, hardly daring to hope...
There she was, with that joyously familiar half annoyed, half-embarrassed smile she often got around Mom. “Alex!” he yelled, forgetting for the moment that this was a hospital, and hurtling himself towards her bedside for the long-awaited hug.
She fielded him with tears in her eye and a huge throb of pain in her head, but it was worth every second of pain to hug her little bro again. She couldn’t believe she had been ready to leave this… to leave everything… and give all her life up to death. She felt as if that had been another person who chose that path, and she was unimaginably grateful for her failure at blowing out her brains. She smelled everything for the first time, saw everything for the first time, felt everything for the first time… it was unfortunate that she saw and smelt a hospital, and felt mostly unbearable pain, but still. She was alive, and Danny was here for her to look after, and that was all that mattered.


























Chapter 2, Part 1:
The next few weeks in the hospital seemed to crawl by; yet as Alex looked back, they seemed to fill mere seconds in time. In either case, they were not pleasant weeks. Danny was forced to return to school after Alex proved stable and awake for a day or two, but he still stopped by every opportunity he got. Alex would re-assure him that she’d be fine, and try to laugh off her pain and indignity. Although he didn’t say anything, Danny knew her, and he could see that she was falling back into depression. It was obvious to the boy that had seen the look on her face as she pulled the trigger, heard her late-night mutterings in her darkest dreams… the boy that had seen her blatant horror at the first realization of the extent of her actions. He knew her all right, but that didn’t mean he would degrade her further by letting anyone know how easily he could read her.
Alex, however, had no idea that her brother saw all this. She believed she was doing a monumental job at keeping her steady, progressive return to depression secret. In fact, she was even hiding the truth of it from herself. She had begun to lie to herself again, and she wasn’t even consciously aware of it. “I mean,” she thought, “it’s only to be expected that I’m a little depressed after realizing I’ll never use my left eye again, right? I’m sure that’s all this is. It’ll go away if I just ignore it.” But the problem was – it wasn’t, and it showed no sign of doing so. Her depression worsened every day.
As to her eye – that was certainly part of it, but nowhere near all of it. The doctors had explained to her as Danny, her mom, Mitch, and even her father had sat by, that, when Alex had shot herself, her hand had moved just slightly, so that the bullet came at an angle from below her left cheekbone. It had scraped against her skull, and severed all the nerves tied to her left eye in the process, causing the skin to almost peel off of her face. They were not certain how Alex had survived the loss of blood, or why the bullet had not entered her eye-socket as it severed the nerves, but, whatever the reason, Alex was still alive. They had sewn her face back together as soon as she arrived at the hospital. Her left eye had been removed since it would have rotted away in her head, but she had received a new, glass eye, and she reveled in removing it to people’s avid disgust and delight.

Chapter 2, Part 2:
Alex’s days were filled with medical tests and therapy sessions, while her nights were filled with the same single repeating nightmare. The nightmare was always the same, always as inexplicably frightening. She would always be about six or seven years old in her dream. While she was not sure what happened before, the piece that she always remembered was this: she would be creeping down the stairs from the lighted hallway to the kitchen, and the only noise would be the most subtle yet obvious thrumming in her ears as she descended. As she walked through the living room and the dining room, the thrumming would increase, and when she reached the kitchen, where she always intended to get a glass of water, the thrum would reach the strongest point yet. From the moment she walked in the door, everything in her dream would happen in what must have been seconds, but always felt like hours. She would be struck by a sudden, petrifying terror just inside the kitchen doorway, and the open laundry room door would begin to creak slowly closed. As she saw the vision it had concealed, she would drop the glass she had never been aware of holding, and watch, as though through another’s eyes, as it shattered silently at her feet. Always, it revealed the same three, haunting figures.
On her left, would be the wolf, his mouth opened, his muzzle raised in an eternal, silent howl. On the right would be a figure that might have been mistook as Yoda from Star Wars, but for the long shock of jet-black hair falling past his shoulders. He always leaned on the same gnarled staff, and his green wrinkled face was wizened with age. She could see his mouth move, but no matter how hard she listened, she could never hear the meaning he tried to convey. The figure in the center, that one was the most common place and frightening of the three. Always in the center sat the same potted birch; and always, aside from a single vibrant green leaf at the top, the tree was dead. At the topmost branch of the tree would sit a raven, black as eternity with cackling eyes.
And every time, the second she took the imagery in, her fear would pass terror; her fear would reach a point when she was so deeply afraid, that she was numb to her fear, where she was beyond fear. This miracle lasted only a moment, never more, but enough time for her to spin away from the figures… and she knew no more of her dream beyond that point.
She knew there had to be both a beginning and an end to her dream – whether remembered or not dreams always have them – but she had neither the will nor the desire the discover what other sights her subconscious had lying in wait for her.