Annie ran off her thoughts and leapt into some divine dream she conjured through years of practice. She turned fifty in a moment. Had her first child upon a cloud. Annie’s husbands had green eyes, unlike hers which were blue. Their dream child disappeared like a memory scratched off the brain. Because Annie was now a hundred years old and she wanted to be a god. So she stretched herself until she was the size of Everest and extended her hands like a conductor. She flipped the world upside down and shook out its seas and skies into a pile of pieces, placing them back together as she liked. Annie, the god. There would be no blood in her dream world. And she had forgotten what crying was long ago. Annie’s world died on her three-hundredth birthday when some strange sound caught her attention. Far below, buried beneath the earth, was a call. It reminded her of that child she once had. She picked her brightest star and fell to earth, looking for the source of that noise. There was a rock that quivered as though it was cold. Annie lifted it with thought and found a little girl sitting in the rubble. The girl had no eyes. She had no nose. Her only feature was her mouth which gaped like a wound, weeping scream after scream. That howling snapped something inside Annie’s mind. Suddenly she could hear rustling and whispers, muted as though they were coming from another room. But what was a room? There was a firmness beneath her body, and she was covered in some veil. Not soft like the clouds she lived inside but softened enough for sleep. And what was sleep? It didn’t exist in Annie’s world. The screaming stopped. Annie looked at the girl and found she was looking back. A single eye had grown in the centre of her forehead. A terrible eye, which curved in amusement like a sharpened half-moon. Annie read spite in her smile and victory in that glare. Furious, she wiped her hand across the air and struck the ground with lightning. The world burst into flames but the fire was not hot. The girl began to laugh and Annie felt rain pouring down her face. She had forgotten about the rain. Purposefully. Because it resembled tears. And Annie remembered what tears were. She looked around and found her world fading to simple colours. Fading further still to black, like oil spilling across the surface of a pond. The girl spoke with her bleeding face, “Is that all there is?” And Annie murdered her. Something she had never done. She opened her eyes. There was a crack in the ceiling. A tiny spider had made its home there. Her mother was calling her name. Her covers felt heavy across her body. Annie got up and got ready, her head still halfway inside the collapse of that dream. She washed her face and couldn’t meet her own eyes in the reflection. As she caught the bus to school, between the moment of two steps Annie forgot her world. She forgot her three-hundred years. She forgot her child, her husbands, her godliness. Everything was gone. And for an awful moment, Annie froze, knowing she had forgotten something special to her. She grieved. But the next step and even that pain vanished. Like magic, her mind moved on. Annie stared out the bus window, pressed her fingernail into the glass as though she could continue pushing it through. The boy beside her told her to quiet. She had been singing something. Annie hadn’t even realised. The boy called her something and moved to another seat. Annie kept singing. Too tired to stop. “Is that all there is?
Is that all there is? by F.K. Preston
