Sarette's Reve De Mort: And Other Stories Of Not Quite Magical Realism

Or the little dreams of death.

"Hello little Hitler." mother said.

Sarette was not Hitler, she was a girl of plain dress and flowers in her hair. Of course for a brief time, she had issues with French girls, or more specifically, with one French girl. Sarette was a dreamer; when she dreamed, she visualized guillotined hippie couples, making their last embrace. And different internment camps in some vague future time. Yet these were not images of pleasure, but something that effected her sleep.

She would wake up to flowers of death and the future growing out of her bedroom floor with blades of green grass, she would hear the sounds of wolves howling at the moon.

What made a far greater impression than the bits of French stereotyping on TV, was how good the pancakes and crepes were she grew up eating, during the morning before the school bus. She got the name Little Hitler, no do to any fault of her own, but because she fell off of a bunk bed. Regardless of whether her IQ was ninety eight or one hundred and fifteen, it did not impact her self-esteem. People wondered about her sense of humor: on most days she was never smile, and yet would derive some ironic pleasure from another peer's misfortune, despite not obtaining any pleasure from causing it.

Her doctor could never figure out her IQ, as she never seemed to focus on tests, but when it came to putting together blocks in a puzzle, she would solve it in thirty seconds.

Her school was one of those schools, that despite burying the student in an actual graveyard, would schedule the digging of a giant hole in the school yard, as if they were going to bury him. She wanted to hope down into the hole, as maybe Alice in Wonderland would be down inside. But before the imagination got to her, class was in session again.

After word, her mother would always reject the offer whenever her school friends would offer for her to come to their house to play.

But she had her own quirks. She would watch the latest Japanese animation imports, which ranged from Vampire Hunters, magical girls, and giant robots. She spent as much time laying down on her bed, preferring not to listen to music instead; instead her mind was always dizzy, while she refused to drink carbonated beverages so fizzy and loose in the can.

"What drink you want?" her mother asked.

"I want orange flavor." Sarette asked. It was the closest words she could approximate, not having the words for the juice the would always burn her throat. Generally she preferred water, and sometimes milk or orange juice. But never anything that gave her heart burn. As she got older, this preference would eventually go the way of the purple dinosaur, and she would drink Pale Ale and other dark brews. But now was not such a time. Instead it was a time of crappy space adventures, and stories in rhyme.

Not being a fan of magical nannies or stories of yellow teddy bears, she would dream of zombies she would cut in two with giant sheers. This would escalate into her older years, when she tried martial arts. Her favorite being Kendo, and eventually Kenjitsu. On children's programming, she would look at Crabs the same way Germans look at Hitler, and others of their ilk. And thus the idea of crab patties was an object of revulsion.

But that's better than expulsion for dropping a penny on a friend's head from a tree. She would dream of hanged children.

All on a gallows tree.

She always had the shakes. Sometimes life was like a tap dance in hell; you never knew when that last shoe was going to drop. Whether it would be a funeral tap. But she never got the chop.

But dad would call shopping the "chopping list."

And every day was a chopping list.

In sixth grade Sarette began resenting musical expression, yet some of her earlier work was reflective of the various five point essays about American history as assigned to her by her special ed teacher. She was never in the classes because of learning difficulties in the same way others experience, as the accelerated reader would mandate for her to read young adult fiction rather than the middle grade of which she was a part of the age group. She would read stories about teenage werewolves, and other shape shifters. Her mother for a time would avoiding talking about her concerns about Sarette being a child Hitler, allegations which would later prove unfounded anyway.

Instead, she would cringe whenever she would have to sit through Spanish class, preferring stories about the original French Revolution. In later years she would pilfer a book about Marie Antoinette off of the shelves of her grand father's basement. She developed a fascination with the guillotine from an early age, and would dream about other girls having their heads cut off. The stock slipping over their necks, the angular blade falling in three seconds on the victims neck, and the thirty minute of consciousness that remained, as the woman is aware of the crowd jeering at her raven locks.

Sarette was never a girl of Jesus Sandals, or other things more common across both genders. She had never liked wearing open toed shoes, under the perception that Birkenstocks were mainly for ladies. But this was closer to an early sign of her eventual taste in women, rather than any reflection on reality. She developed a friendship with a girl a year earlier who was a Mexican of half Spanish and half French descent. She was one of the few girls that she never dreamed about being decapitated. Sarette however, despised the musical accompaniment associated with the heritage, from Mariachi to Flamenco.

Mariachi was originally a word of French origin from Napoleonic times. But generally the word became more associated with French immigrants to Mexico. Generally people associated Mexico with Spanish language and immigrants, but this was not universally the case. There would be several battles during the late eighteen hundreds for supremacy of Mexican territory. She associated the music of the sombrero and and taquitos with the actor who played as a masked vigilante in different movie adaptations in the nineties, who she would imagine, in all her denial of her bi curiosity, him carrying a black rose in his mouth.

She would later read about a confused article writer who confused being Hispanic and French. Thus the association of Mariachi and La Guillotine was permanently affixed in her brain. This was before her own general disdain for different aspects of the fantasy genre: she grew to resent long hair brunette girls for being more pretty, despite herself having not yet fully bloomed. And she would not even look at Senoritas in the face, even in situations of mutual attraction. During classes of monotonous subtraction.

There was another girl that was never one she was super wild about.

Generally the difference was this: Livier would alway be nice and patient, yet she was difficult to understand. Bianca was a girl of excellent vocabulary, who were shape shift into a were cat during the moonlight hour, crushing rose placed inside those lovely black lipstick lips. But for Sarette's Reve De Mort, she dreamed of shadows along the wall, and groans of zombies in the halls. And bright lights from her bedroom window.

She woke up with bite marks.

She woke up in breathless panics.

Seventh grade was one of those years when everything seemed to go wrong. At Smyrna Middle, one of these was meeting Bianca again in the school halls, despite Sarette subconsciously avoiding her every step. She had grown a general dislike for raven haired girls who cropped their hair shoulder length, especially if they had short necks.

It was one of those years when she dreamed of the wild west, and in every one of these Bianca would be there. She would be taunted her with her childhood friend Stephanie, who was her lesser mean spirited bitch and a half. Stephanie still was the type to say things like "French girls don't like attractive boys, we like ugly boys. And you're not very ugly." She was insinuating by implication that Sarette was technically a boy child, despite all of her appearances to the contrary. She did not see Livier as much, who would often be busy doing other things during the school year. Smyrna Middle had a school uniform that was difficult to enforce, and usually mostly used to pick on the girls at school, who often wore short skirts. But somewhere in the middle, Sarette would often be picked on like a girl, and yet be gendered as if she were a boy.

She would try to keep her shirt tucked in, but found this difficult. She battle mild weight issues for much of her life, though not anything like she currently does, in which she's still trying to lose weight. But it still meant having to get special tee shirts that wont easily become not tucked. She used to hate the button ups that would come with uniforms, and how she would have to wear these even during school field trips.

Among other issues, she resented the looks she would get from Bianca, when her shirt was not tucked. It was almost as if Bianca payed more attention to her then now that Sarette was no longer playing air guitar during the fifth grade school year. In a sense, who crushed on who seemed almost entirely to the inverse. And it was her who would often laugh out with one boy in class that would wantonly use the word retard at her expense. It didn't matter if this was during paperwork, or when they were cutting open frogs.

But Sarette derived some satisfaction from the fact that Bianca would often have to leave the classroom to vomit, whenever she had to dissect a dead frog on a silver slab. For Sarette, she regarding Bianca in the same way as the frog. But preferred not dissecting her. Leaving out in the scorching desert of a surrealistic wild west, decapitated on a guillotine in black Mary Janes heels was more than appealing enough. And she knew that at some point, at least she hoped, that she may eventually forget about Bianca.

From then on, generally, Sarette developed the attitude that if people wanted to date her, they had one chance to make a request. If they don't request on her schedule, then she had better things to do with her time. Like listen to The Offspring and Ramones.

As soon as late middle came along, she stopped socializing altogether.

It simply wasn't worth the sun tan to drawn in people she might like to date. She preferred fictional girls. As girls in fiction could never reject you the first time.

And she was worth more.

This she knew.

In ninth grade, Sarette had determined she preferred blow jobs over vanilla sex, and developed a sexual fetish for girls in Birkenstock Clogs. It had been a minor interest as far back as early grade school, but only completely became a sexual thing around this time. This made interaction with other girls difficult, as it often meant having to start the school day concealing her raging boner, instead of being flat as a pancake.

Often this was because Birkenstock Clogs were the latest fashion in Blackman High, comparable to platform sneakers during the nineteen nineties. Girls her age would wear them without socks, and would dangle them about in a form of Ballet shoe play. Their bare heels begging for attention from Sarette's hazel eyes, whom really liked ladies heels. And their long dark brown hair, that would go down to their backs. In large part, this was the main reason she never interacted, though she gave one her guy friends a clue to her preference for these sorts of girls. Yet oddly the thing about being an androgynous girl, is often when guys are unsure whether they should be attracted to you or not, they'll think of doing things on a subconscious level they don't entirely understand.

This would often mean being invited to the quarry in the back of the friend's house. And throw home made napalm bombs at the rocks walls in front of you, and hoping the police wont catch you n the act. The secrets of friendships were considered a form of sacred pact. A divine ritual, a form of blood oath. For Sarette, she wanted her blood oath to be with ladies in Birkenstocks, as they would glide themselves along her thin body under the glow of L.E.D. lights, buzzing out in the suburban pseudo-metropolis.

But her and her guy friend were inherently different. Tommy was politically a moderate Republican, though he called himself a democrat. While Sarette's Reve De Mort were of midnight cities taken over by corporate mercenaries, and outlaws in distant futures.

She tried writing some of these futures, though have difficulty finishing stories. She would fantasize about blond and black haired girl's necks being placed on headsman's blocks. She would fantasize about being their merciful executioner, while humping them on the block. But her own life would split from Tommy, who would later go onto become more vocal about his sexuality. But Sarette was of the anarcho-left, and not of the right. She kissed her old friendships goodnight, dreaming of white night flowers and middle grade stories. For her, her desire was a kind of paradox of isolation and being overcrowded. She wanted a certain level of anonymity mainstream education never gave her.

She found this initially in Alex Jones.

Then it was Christopher Greene. But now it was Noam Chomsky. She the little anarchist, who mischievously gave a family inside of a corn maze the wrong direction toward the exit. But she herself was an existential wanderer in the darkness, holding her thumb out for cars on ancient highways.

She was little Hitler that wasn't.

When Sarette received her first official fellatio, it was on her seventeenth year. Her ex guy friend had arranged a date with one of his old fuck mates, and he had the two girls go to the prom together. But her acquaintance knew that Sarette was not entirely into her; Sarette would often look at other girls wearing Birkenstock Boston clogs without socks, but during their last few months, Sarette made Lawanda extra strong coffee.

She was used to having Starbucks coffee, so having Folgers was decidedly strange anyway. This meant that at greater strengths Folgers would stop having the same level of flavor that Kenyan roast would have. The night before, her acquaintance directed her into the rest room, and had Sarette sit on the toilet while her friend blew her off. Sense this is not an erotica novella, the short explanation is that Sarette's nob never became inflated. But it effected her views about sex from then onwards.

Generally this effected her views is initially subtle ways, first she generally didn't like the idea of being touched by other people; eventually she came to prefer the flow of animated blow jobs over the real thing. Eventually this involved into tools for BDSM that wasn't not strictly BDSM, such as fantasy elf girls locked in the pillory. Eventually she would fantasize about humping elf girls in the stocks, while the girls wore Birkenstocks. And these fantasies would follow up with the sound of thunder outside the window. The window, as Sarette slept at night, would wake her from a dream of headless aliens in the closet, coming out in order to hump her on the bottom.

She woke up with bite marks and scratches.

She scratched herself like a cat.

Her body, her pussy.

Sarette's first ventures out of high school, revolved mostly around her writing, when she wasn't working at a local department store. It was one of the few times that she would not be ran over by a store cart, giving her back troubles for the length she had worked at the store.

Work was filled with memories; most of her work was spent when she was no eating enough for the vane effort of losing weight, now considered a sin by "body positivity" quacktivists. Because of this, she would sometimes faint and fall unconscious on the floor, a nature of her own biology that would continue into when she had went to Washington. She would primarily eat cafeteria pizza, usually after Fencing class. But during every other day of the week she would eat primarily chocolate peanut butter energy bars, then order a water or milk. In total, her lunch was spent eating about 200 calories. She lost down to about one hundred and forty five pounds.

This might not seem that skinny, but consider that she was of stocky build and physique. This meant that in order to look feminine this would often mean being as much as thirty pounds overweight.

The rest of her youth was spent contemplating.

Between jumping in front of a car.

Or coming out as trans.

We all know now that Wikipedia is unreliable.

Sarette wasn't sure why Clayton Ledford gave her a seventy five on a school test, revolving around the Baghdad Battery. For one thing, her own issues with Wikipedia stemmed from her anarchist tendencies, while for her computer teacher, these stemmed from it not being as good a source as an encyclopedia. But the assignment was to try find a reliable source of information on line. At this point, Wikipedia had been considered the primary source of information for some, and only sometime later did information regarding its corruption come to light. But certain sources could be cross-verified across different websites. For example, regarding the origin of the Romanian language.

But it gave her the negative association with any sort of computer class, as teachers in general focused on grades rather than the actual absorbing of information. Thus she focused month after month on teaching herself how to program in Ruby, and maybe eventually learn Python. But with the internet being what it was, especially on certain social media websites, generally people were hassled about their programming ability merely for being of the opposite gender, rather than based on any particular skill they had. Thus most of her explorations in learning cryptography she largely had to teach herself.

But now instead of focusing on studies, she focused mainly on researching true crime cases: generally these revolved around different kinds of serial killers; these would inspire different characters that were a hybrid of various real life serial killers and grave robbers. But at the end of the day, she preferred computer hackers and secret agents, along with your average private eye. She carried around a magnifying class, a box of black ink to take people's fingerprints, along with other tools of the trade. Eventually this would collide with her own interest in what they called the UFO topic at the time (such thing are not identified as extraterrestrial craft) as the paranormal.

She had had cases of seemingly magical things happen throughout her life, but it was these past few month, starting from her Junior high school year, that enabled that eventual fact that she would go onto join the Billy Meier cult. She had been through months as an alien abducted girl, many of these experiences being of a largely sexual nature. There would be various headless brown colored gray alien women coming out of her closet, and she would be taken away outside of the window, but the glass itself would not open.

One the other side, was a flying saucer.

She would float above the flying saucer, and then wake up one evening outside on the road to Smyrna High School, despite herself never having went to that particular high school. And it was thing, among a multitude of other experiences, that made he eventually not only find other sources of information, but also made her begin to question authority in general.

As the news she watched was RT.

And this gave no further clues.