1. Searching

I am in my aunt's apartment, particularly my aunt's, as this is set to the tune of my uncle's demise. The place is quiet and claustrophobic. My aunt sits between the few rooms and weeps, facing the closed, sharply maroon front door. The only door in which to leave.


...


There is a kitchen with an oily oven hidden in an alcove. There is a room with wooden chairs and a broken television, a small stack of shelves huddle nervously in a corner holding books that are scented with liquor. There is a bathroom with a surprising number of mirrors, smallest a keychain with faux-hand mirror attached, largest a glinting steel man-sized Narsian which may have been procured from a clothes shop. There are two bedrooms facing each other to which I open and enter without care, the place was always too small to deny the much needed space and as such they were treated like second living rooms. Both sleeping spaces are identical, save white linen, rather than a garish red, bedspread and dressing table within my aunt's.


...


I discover nothing that was not as it always was as I roam between the bedrooms, I search high and low, turning over the dressing table and flinging open drawers with increasing desperation, desiring above all something terrifying, to allow myself the succour of nightmare. So that I may leave for some forest or underground bunker to be chased or better yet, to lucidly raise a handgun to the daemon of the night.


...


But no, this dream is only this.


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...
...


For my own reasons I roll dice, at the end of each day's writ I will show you what I have gained or lost. It is white with black marks, six-sided, which I deem to be a proper die.

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