She sleeps and she sleeps and she sleeps. She was in the ambulance, she remembers that, remembers the lights as they turned off in her head, one by one by one. She remembers the loss, the distance, the emptiness, the medics saying she’s dead, she can’t even hear us, and how badly she wanted to speak, to scream, to do anything but lie there in the shelled enclosure of her own silence. To jerk awake, to touch something, anything, to insist she was awake, alive, still a person.
Now she’s awake again-- the halls of the Chicago Art Institute are enormous, but now the place is bathed in dismal shadow unbroken but for the waxy light of the moon. It’s not right-- she hates the dark, her Palace is always autumn. When she slides off the elegant Victorian fainting couch, subdued in its gold thread, its rich emerald, she walks steps she remembers into the main hall and--
The portrait there is Saturn Devouring His Son, the hideous Goya masterpiece, a grotesque thing, and she can swear if she looks it’s real, it’s watching inside a cage, not a painting. She finds herself nauseated-- disgusted, but she can’t pin down why, and when she turns she’s almost slammed in the face by Hannibal Lecter. He’s tall, as he always is, was, will be, and his hair is a colorless blonde, iron grey. Burgundy eyes sweep across her face. He doesn’t say anything.
And then he’s not there. She blinks and he leaves, like the click of a film reel moving from one scene to the next.
She doesn’t know who she’s talking to.
