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

When she went to bed, she thought of her future. She thought of her time without her room mate, who had been toxic with her and her finances. If only it was so easy to think of it in this way. In truth, she wasn't sure whether she would find any friend back home in Tennessee. And the only real advantage was getting some inter web access when she got "home". Home had never really been home, as she never really had any sense of privacy. Her dad would always comment on her lack of a right to privacy, and would at times open the bedroom door with a lock pick. He would then sneak up, and tickle her toes. She would scrunch up her nose like a bunny rabbit. She was to afraid to smack him in the face.

It is in this context, she thought of the old schoolyard that she used to play in when she grew up. And how as time went on even back then home never really felt like home. For the butterfly, there was no longer any goodnight kisses. In town there was the old Lutheran church from the 1980s, among other tourist attractions that were no more entertaining than watching paint dry. It sure beat the constant uneasiness of her room mate that would always find a way to distract her from her writing life.

At night her room mate would comfort her, with the butterfly having nobody she could trust. She would be crying, curling her legs up in a fetal position dreaming of wolves of yesteryears. Yet the room mate was not as trustworthy as could be, and indeed the room mate even in their most vulnerable hours would find some way to use them for their own personal ends. It is indeed to late now to make amends. And that is why the idea of her room mate being homeless carries mixed feelings that continue to follow her into Smyrna. For the butterfly, there was no more good night kisses to share.

She thinks only of the moonlight that trickles through the window, as she dreams of wolves and vampires in the night.

The butterfly was twenty seven, a year before she was twenty six. It was only just recently she thought of the idea of learning to drive again. It had been prompted by the idea of her wanting to live in an RV, and travel to Canada to visit Montreal. She had always wanted to learn French, but had been concerned about her memory and concentration issues. Her parents had always thought it be more worthwhile to study for the gateway. After all if you passed that, you could go onto college and learn languages later. It wasn't until later when she had wanted to write her most current novel, that she realized how important learning French was. She was a long ways away from the little girl who her dad always insisted on giving a buzz, and would not yet realize she was trans. For the butterfly had not yet sprouted her wings, and her story was not yet over when the old lady sings.

That cliche of life, the butterfly hoped that the lady would sing sooner rather than later. But sometimes suicide doesn't work that way, and she was unsure how easy it would be to hide the fact that she was poisoning herself slowly with bleach. She thought of her mother who would spank her ten times each, and at time grab her bottom like in old times.

It was an easy future to predict.

Her future was always her past. It would be back to the old grind for the little butterfly, who wanted only to sleep. And briefly in her life, she hoped the old lady would weep. Yet nights are so dreary, she wanted to be with someone to call her deary. For she although she was never one for pet names, she wanted to be called a pet night and snuggled with.

At least until the night came to a close.

Many, many, many hours to go.

The butterfly had purchased herself a bag of roll your own. Being told that roll your own was inherently cheaper than buying previously rolled cigarettes, she was skeptical at first until she purchased herself some pipe tobacco. This tobacco was in fact not pipe tobacco, but regular cigarette tobacco marked down in a one pound bag that can last you the greater part of a year if you bought ten, at sixty dollars and fifty cents not included tax. Some regions don't have tax benefits do to a lack of Native American settlements, though some may have their own tax benefits.

For the particular bag she was smoking, it smelled even before than a more expensive variety. The more expensive being such because tobacco is charged by the unit. Buying a single unit drastically marks down the price. And when you're straddling the line between lower middle class and homeless, you better be looking for any kind of deal you can get. It may make the difference between a week of rent owing sixty bucks, and missing an entire week. The butterfly was glad to be out of this situation, however she was unsure what it would be like after the next few months in her hometown.

Mostly likely most of her friends had already moved out of state, but in a few years a high school reunion was coming up. For very specific reasons, beyond the scope of this story of the butterfly's life, let's just say she did things that made her a legend in the minds of her coed classmates, and was unsure how they would take her actually being female.

At twenty seven the butterfly wanted to be a children's writer, but was unsure how to go about it. It had been many months since she had written her two previous complete middle grade novelettes and a half way complete partial. She had written for many years, though this was never acknowledged by her mother who always bragged on her about her potential as an illustrator. True up to a point, drawing for the butterfly was almost as natural as breathing, except now the butterfly breathed a mix of normal air and carbon dioxide that will eventually make her die at an young old age of 59--if she lived that long. So there was only so many years she could get some writing in. She felt as if her old life was returning again.

She left a lot of things behind. At time it felt as if she left everything behind. Everything including her life. The butterfly had wanted to move out of the country, and for now those plans are still on the table with scattered playing cards et the roll of the dice. She still wanted to learn to speak French, but she was unused to even speaking in English let alone another language. And as if last year she had had negative associations with the language ever since she met one girl that had helped her on her last novel. The only good French woman was a dead French woman, and the butterfly was not the one to make that happen.

That, of course, was the job of Marine Le Pen.

The butterfly, as a blood butterfly, had fantasies of decapitated women. But this fantasy was a mixture of artificial pleasure and sadness. For despite her being drawn into the glow of digital sexuality, she found herself also increasingly disgusted by the idea of herself liking it when others fall. At times she wanted to be the one to fall, if for no other reason than to avoid a high school school reunion. That was her old life.

She wanted to leave it all behind.

But life wasn't a clock. You couldn't rewind. She wanted to rewind back to her childhood, if for no other reason to dream of wolves and to face her own fears about herself. She wanted to be the one that slashed the wolf.

It was all a dream.

A dream of hands washed in blood.

When the butterfly spent time at her old home, she slept on the couch for as long as she could. She could only think of one word: Home.

"Home, ... home, ... home." That was the only word she could say, as she reclined and listened to the old pod casts she used to enjoy, along with the reminders of Christmas, that had made her attempt suicide for the first time on her birthday in May. It was a lot of bull, but a Bull that for once ... perhaps for a little while, that could take. She had gone without sleep for the longest time since she ran out of sleep medication. She also took medication for acid, though in the time spent in Milton, Washington she had not had problems with irritable bowel syndrome.

Something to barf about indeed. All this was gone in the time she spent in Washington, and yet her old room mate made all their money run out. It made her want to shout, for the butterfly had no idea how poorly such a homely lass could spend the butterfly's money along with her own proceeds. She thought of all the tobacco that was spent, and how The Flower got her into the smoking habit. That's one smoking blood butterfly. The butterfly would at times try to distract herself from her own fantasies, part of this being topics about UFOs. Despite her room mates insistence on not indulging in the topic, she still found herself against her better judgment at times out of curiosity drawn to videos about local sightings, among other topics evangelicals tend to refer to as woo.

She was constantly awake, yet constantly asleep. A kind of constant paradox that keeps her from functioning during the day. It had been this way since the month of May. Birthdays, along with Christmas, always carried a kind of sorrow. It reminded her of reminders of the fact that despite hormones, despite bottom surgery, she could never be the girl she always considered herself to be. The butterfly dreamed of being a modal for cover magazines, in fantastical locations like Alsatian Tennessee, yet with the hints of being on the coast of Myrtle Beach, Fenwick Island, and Cote d'Azul. She wanted to travel the world in a single location.

The world as her home.

The world only in her mind. Yet her ideas of fashion would never match the idea of what mainstream programming considered such.

She liked Boston clogs to much.

She liked girls in Boston clogs.

At twelve o'clock she would prepare lunch, generally Rouge Omelets Sandwiches and a glass of Merlot. Unfortunately no Chianti with beans, though she certainly like to hiss in the Cuisine. She wasn't sure why she still tried doing such, while she masturbated to cute girls dressed like the dutch. Sometimes life rhymes that way, as she goes along her merry way and flutters off into a sea of confusion and torment when she cuts herself to drip her own blood, just a little bit, into the omelet along with fine wine. All this activity on a day of hardly ever going outside of your room. Indeed, it had always been this way since she was eighteen.

She still feared the day the nightmares would come again, nightmares of strange shapes in the night, of headless aliens that would mount her in her sleep. Although better a hot alien princess that a human girl that looks like Princess Pig. Just with curly blond hair and not such pink skin. She thought of the old nightmare she used to have, and thought of a lullaby to make them go away:

On a night like this,

On a night like this I long to rest.

Give me my solace, do your best so I now sleep.

For the butterfly that longed to get a normal sleep, she wanted to turn back the clock of time.

And rewrite Mr. Clocktime.

It was better then seeing girls get the chop.

She wanted take them with her to shop for shoes. At times in her fantasies she would no longer feel horny seeing girls being decapitated, and when she did saved them because she didn't want to. To live in spite of herself. In spite of her own torment, in spite of everything she had ever known.

She loved a French girl.

From Alsace.

It was a few weeks since the butterfly stopped her matchstick burning habit. She liked how the matchsticks could be sharpened into a point, the proper paper needing a rough texture. At times she would prod herself with toothpicks as some form of vice and desire, like some atheistic masochistic shrine dweller. In the dark she waits for moonlight in the daylight hours, and watches as the rain begins to shower.

There are many ways she likes to cook, she had always liked to cook with eggs, and had always wanted to try a new dish ever since she had left her last room mate in Washington, who she would alway ask whether she wanted to come with her back to Tennessee. Although on some level she wanted her to be here, it was more like a parent to their offspring rather than as some romantic interest, as much as her room mate would hate to admit it. The butterfly didn't want experience love, but she want someone to snuggle with. Ideally someone them self who was safe, though not in the way that her room mate referred to as safe. The butterfly had her idea of safe. The butterfly fluttered away into her new life.

The life of a blood butterfly.

The life of a sex addict, addicted to blood. The fluid of the mother's womb. The indigestible.

Her truth.

The butterfly found greater affinity for those in earlier times, perhaps on some level because she could get the know the real "them", like the flower girl getting to know the real "soldier" in a fantastic game recently being remade for profits by already rich multinationals. But she wouldn't have to meet them in person, because then there would be cultural barriers. The butterfly was torn between two cultures, always has been. For her, the original idea was go to Japan to get into the Manga industry. But she found drawing sequential art to much trouble at first, because drawing in a way was more like trying to emulate life in a photograph. And there was nothing lifelike in the flow of panels.

This was despite the fact that despite her having grown up reading manga, she found herself preferring to write prose. Art and Prose were like competing factions fighting for the control of various tropical regions, especially on the inter webs where various cultures could both clash and gel together in a kind of hate/love relationship. The butterfly hated how web comic communities fade out from existence seemingly overnight, and in the times they were around would be disparaging to prose. By contrast the writers would often suggest not drawing your own covers. At times she wanted to build her own website, especially when she was still part of the decentralized dark web. Diaspora of course, has its own way of things. Though at least she could learn some French.

Her own view own cultures in meat-space was similar, almost to a fault. For she found the French something to aspire to without that particular fatal flaw, why write dystopian novels when you have ones in the real world. But even then this was infinitely better than Brexit England. Infinitely better than the United States ou Canada. It was like Japan of the EU. Only paved with severed heads, still a mixture of sexual pleasure and remorse. Yet her room mate, despite being abusive in her own ways, always said how fantasy was different from actuality. The actuality of cutting off a pretty girl's head, and holding in your chest in a mixture of crying and ejaculation. The aspect of being male that was always a reminder of the gender she was born with, that was not the real her.

The butterfly wanted nothing else.

She wanted to be the real her. She wanted to be the real her with a culture she felt affinity with, and not the US where she always felt like an alien even among strangers. Landing in a UFO, greeting the world with peace while being stabbed to death with pitchforks, and being so human that cult leaders in splinter cults give you dietary advice et talked you into purchasing negative ion generators in order to clear your sinuses, among other traumas.

There were times she attempted suicide, now counting to about four attempts. She couldn't bring herself to tell her friend, the only girl she ever really loved more than love, that she had many problems of her own. She didn't want to tell her how much she loved her, as in that culture generally saying such disqualified you for any love matching. Although certainly there has been Americans that have managed to marry Italians. But that's the Italian's. Very different in France, even in regions that used to belong to the Italians, so she found out from one of her French correspondents helping her etudier en Francaise avec il gentleness.

To many people are way to kind for her, while she goes on a self-destructive path, admiring authors like Silvia Plath. She didn't want to tell her friend the truth.

It would be to soon.

Yet in the darkness of her heart, there was something that kept her going as her life was going slow toward a final stop.

A dream of a lost Mme.

A dream of a happy girl. A desire to watch and see how things unfold, even if that meant it was a kind of love she could never have. Her own friend's love.

It was Ami's love.

The butterfly didn't like character studies, though part of it was her own innate greenness. As green as the cap she wore that reminded her of the Irish, before it somehow in her mind reminded her to much of the French.

But even if she went to Ireland searching for fairies and marigolds, there was a certain portion of French people that lived there. But for so long her main issue had been with French-Americans, not the country of France. One of the girls she had known in fifth grade always referred her as "not quite cute, but not quite ugly." It was a matter of frustration, the long windiness of saying ugly-cute in a long drawn drawn out fashion. She began to hate, specifically French girls, with a passion.

Even now the butterfly browses the inter webs, searching for ways to know whether a French girl likes her, as it was never something she could tell. She only knew how to know when a sarcastic girl liked her, and she knew lots of them.

After all, everyone is sarcastic, at least most of the time. Especially at fancy diners under the moonlight.

It effected her view of classic entertainment like Phantom Of The Opera, despite the author himself being known opponent of capital punishment. She began to want them all to be beheaded, and had a preoccupation for the topic. Especially for cute girls that visited Gothic fashion stores. And then she met a girl named Liver, and for a moment even so early questioned her fantasies for blood. And then she turned to the wrong television channel.

A woman placing her neck on the block.

That was all she wrote. The butterfly disliked the idea of rescued princesses. In her mind what good did that do for Levier who she couldn't save. And her imagining the Mexican girl's anguished face put in her a personal torment she could never leave. She didn't believe in happy endings.

It never really worked that way. At least she refused to believe that it would work out that way.

Perhaps that why she drank bleach.

To wash away the tears.

Even after all these years she still hates the girl from fifth grade, but it has become increasingly a distant memory. The butterfly is not sure whether she'll meet a nice French girl. She wasn't sure how to feel about French girls, truth be told. She didn't want to become a slave to anybody, fly by airplane and get sold. She remembered the mother of the boy infused with alien cells in one her favorite Cyberpunk games. His mother would say "I want you to find a nice girl, that will take care of you."

It was hard to explain how she didn't trust the British, it was different from how she didn't trust the French. She masturbated to Joan Of Arc, yet spat at Ann Boleyn. And yet every other girl she liked in history and fiction had a name similar to Ann. But Christmas Songs always carried manifold sadness: it reminded her of how Santa would always refer to her by her male name, and she never got feminine gifts of any sort. As well, as she got older, she thought of nothing but Ann Boleyn, whose song written by Henry VIII had its lyrics rewritten for some Christian song. She always liked witches, but for whatever reason never Ann.

The butterfly couldn't even mend her own wings.

She didn't think anyone else would have the energy to do so. And take the time to listen.

For broken wings...

Nothing but silence.

Her aunt got her some French videos, perhaps things might look up from here. Maybe not, and even if she knew French, there was still that woman that wanted to hold a referendum for the death penalty. The butterfly didn't want to have capital punishment anywhere.

She wanted to forgive herself.

And show her face to the world. Perhaps a new adventure, where she can be like the little fourteen year old going on an adventure to see the world, visiting ghost ships, and being followed by a young girl with a puffy sidekick that goes poof, poof, poof. She withdrew from her childhood favorite.

Her only joy in the world.

Her own escape. To be:

Just in time for dinner,

Under the glow of restaurant lights.

Slowly eating under candle lights,

The young adventure waves good by to father,

It wasn't worth saying goodbye to mom,

Nobody wants to avoid the world.

For the butterfly, she was just in time. To acknowledge the cloudiness of life. Just in time for diner. But she likes spicy food, and doesn't have red hair. She had long curly brown hair. It was a Grandia. To not let PTSD control you. Or listen to the drole of alien viruses eating your memories away.

She wanted to live her way. She could be her own computer hacker, her own misty eyed fourteen year old, and her own memories she can rely on herself.

Adelaida was antsy for sacrilege.

With her long bleached her, she had never seen a butterfly, except in photographs. However when she saw that particular butterfly, she felt a mixture of disgust and sexual pleasure. The idea of someone being turned on by her decapitation made her want to vomit, from the death of a loved one in a car crash just a few weeks prior. And yet, there was something in the butterfly she wanted to poke its wings. A gamer of sorts, she had been raised on games all her life since her birth at the turn of the century. Through the century, she had known nothing but battle systems. But life was its own kind of dangerous game, she had known this since she had had to force herself to leave the Cult Of The Flying Angel.

With her new life taking increasingly bleaker and stranger angles, she found herself willing to experiment with getting to know someone from "the other Union" that itself had lost the rest to break up into smaller states since the end of the civil war.

Her country was a land of supernatural lore mixed with the contrast of city life et countryside along the coast. But she only came there occasionally, and spent most of her high school career caught up in lots of studies, along with a boyfriend in her own country she would always kiss. Yet she had the desire to leave this country, and move up North where her family had always joked were notorious for incest. Whether she could get a better life, she knew not. But she would do her best to make do with a country she had only barely been familiar with.

Like the blood butterfly, would have a period she would not to adjust to the new culture and lifestyle, even if part of their language was based on Latin even though the other was Germanic. She wore two Boston Clogs, not realizing these were the kink of the butterfly overseas. She would wear them taking off her rest shoes, her bare feet needing a break from the black high heels she would always wear to please somebody, even if that wasn't men. The men here were pushovers and subservient. She desired no subservience in herself and others, and wanted to lay on one side of the bed, and the other on the other side of the bed. One can only guess whether she found about her own country like the blood butterfly did about hers.

Total disgust.

What is true is that the blood butterfly felt no affinity for her homegrown life, and grew tired of her parents always insisting on packing her bags for her, indeed the only way to not show them she smoked tobacco was by buying Virgina Slims once she reached Smyrna. She was unsure her Adelaida would accept her smoking, or try to get her to quit. There are always unknowns in meeting friends, and sometimes silence for a little while is all you need to restore all the smiles in the world again.

Adelaida wanted to be a butterfly with all her heart, even despite never knowing one. In dreams she would become a swarm of butterflies as numerous as locusts under the glow of the lunar light, and wanted to be a princess on the moon, just like her sailor friends in Japanese anime written in the 90s, recently being rebooted and trying to stay true to the source material. She wanted to hop into the photographs of the blood butterfly, she could meet someone she felt more interesting than her boring life. For there was nothing worse than after school night clubs, and despite being way to skinny would be made fun of for having a little bit of chub.

But for now she showers in the darkness, under the glow of flickering L.E.D. lights. A rub a dub dub. She groaned, she cackled, and she writhed in disgust.

She need someone to trust.

When Adelaida reached Smyrna, Tennessee she was unsure what to expect. The blood butterfly told her that her parents would be out of town. She offered cigarettes to Adelaida, while the blood butterfly smoked nothing but cigarillos under the shade on the moonlight night. "I would say what I wanted to, but I was burned by saying it before with my last room mate. I'm not even sure why I even found myself wanting to go with her to Seattle. Now I have these black clothes, and an upside down cross choker."

"Then don't say anything, let's just watch the stars." As polite as she was direct, indeed that watched nothing but the star on that night in October of 2017. Adelaida didn't like the idea of being in a city she did not recognize, even in her own country sometimes the panic attacks would be to much to handle. She dealt with her younger sibling listening to nothing but dubstep Handle, and use her pigtails for handle bars for a swing set. This was while her younger sibling relied on her not to fall, because Adelaida was so airy she could float to the top of the sky.

But she had not seen them for a while, and wanted to stay here while the blood butterfly went to support group in Chattanooga, that was known for hipsters while Nashville was the home of awful country music stars.

"Could I have a cigarillo?" asked Adelaida.

"Sure I'll break this next one in two." said the blood butterfly.

"No, give me a whole cigarillo."

Adelaida went into town, and found that like the blood butterfly said, Smyrna was becoming almost like a small city. This must of have inspired NashChat. She noticed a sign when she walked to the local smoke shop. It said South Park. She had seen South Park in her native language, and wondered if this was what influenced how the butterfly thought of the imagination intruding into the real world. And intrusion of the mind.

She was back before the butterfly got home.

She got her feel of people, for people were simply to much to handle. While she reclined in her Birkenstock sandals, and watched reruns of 1970s sitcoms and soap opera. Adelaida never understood the butterflies distaste for television.

She loved herself some TV.

She walked into the room the butterfly stayed in, and found it neatly made. She wondered if it was especially made for her. She wanted to rest in bed, and wait for her homesickness to melt away. She wanted to have those blood butterfly wings, and fly once more to the top of the sky.

The butterfly got home with Groceries.

She would have offered to cook for her, but she didn't want to wake up Adelaida. So she kissed her goodnight, gently closed the door, and then took a shower in the guest bathroom. After all it was never fun to be woken up.

No morning in a cup.

No taste of bitter coffee.

Adelaida was almost eighteen, at seventeen she wrote a Halloween story for her friend. She was nervous about what she may think of it, after all writing was something she had never shown on the inter webs, though she wrote plenty of it on her own time in the hours she would be home from school. But for now she wanted to do her own thing, and got tired of translating things.

When she got up, she poked the butterfly in the air. Because she never want to a touch a butterfly's wings. "Let's learn us some French grade 1."

Basic French, for a basic butterfly.

The butterfly is so basic. As basic as Tuna casserole made by her mother when she still lived at home. As basic as a pair of Birkenstock sandals, as basic as an otherwise Jolie la femme.

Basic was the butterfly's life.

Her life, her story.