“I’ve been having nightmares,” she said, threatening to break the ice.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m curious.”

“I’m fucking thirsty.”

A couple of minutes later she was sipping a vodka and coke. She gave a long look at my pack of cigarettes on the table, shook her head and sighed.

“They’re all about the guy I’m seeing,” she began. “Well, not about him, but he shows up in all of them. We’re together, but when I’m not looking he disappears, so I go looking for him and when I find him, he’s like, shapeshifting. And he’s killing everyone.”

“What else is there to do in a nightmare?” I asked.

“Well, I’m sick of watching him kill my mom with a fucking bowling pin.”

“What.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, and tried to contain an embarrassed smile.

“I think I got it from a movie,” she said.

“There Will Be Blood?”

“God, yes,” she said, suddenly uncomfortable, “I don’t want to talk about it, I fucking hated it.”

“Have you tried killing him?”

“I kill him every night,” she whined, “because he kills my mom. But he comes back.”

“So does your mom.”

“Yeah, so he can kill her again,” she took a drink, “fuck that.”

“I have an idea you won’t like.”

“God. What?”

“You could kill your mom before he does.”

“I knew you were gonna say that,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Or,” I offered, “you could say something really fucked up that you’d never say in reality. Hurt his feelings.”

“He doesn’t have much of that,” she said, raising an eyebrow before correcting herself, “or.. many of those. Whatever.”

“You could try dream interpretation,” I was out of ideas, “maybe if you know-”

“I need to try therapy,” she said, eyeing my smokes again.

“Please,” I scoffed. “Just go to the goddamn library.”

A look.

“The li-bra-ry?” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Why?”.

“Freud and Jung put everything in writing,” I shrugged, “and a late fee is cheaper than a copay.”

A long, stern look.

“That’s the shittiest advice I’ve ever gotten here,” she said in monotone before repeating, mocking, “go to the library. Like..”

“You get what you pay for,” I said.

“Obviously,” she muttered, finally taking a cigarette.

“Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you ten ways to turn your psycho sidepiece into a pussycat.”

“I hate cats.”

“Oh,” I said, “then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know,” she sighed, sat back, slouched, “I need to stop bitching.”

“Yeah?”

“My boyfriend says I complain all the time,” she said, distant, brushing ash from her thigh.

“And what does the motherkiller say?”

A look, a smirk, and a curse under her breath as she stubbed out her mostly unsmoked cigarette and rose to her feet.

“Blood sugar,” she said, and was gone.

Notes:

• This was the second of two stories relayed during the same session last night, which I hadn’t tried before. The idea came from the sheer volume of parallels I’ve found and cataloged between all the conversations I’ve recorded, and the “source material” for the letters. It dawned on me that anything with that much quantity was a resource.
• The first relay concluded without incident, and this one was unremarkable until the highlighted sentence was leaving my mouth – and I felt something. The only way I can describe it in physical terms is as a single drop of freezing cold water landing inside the back of my skull. It didn’t hurt, and it was the only thing I felt at all for a couple of seconds. I wasn’t unconscious, but every thought and sense just seemed to vanish instantly and I fell, slumped really, forward onto my face. I had been on my knees, so it could have been worse, but I didn’t feel the collision with the floor. The moment after I landed, I had control again, and could think, and feel. Mostly I felt a burning pain on the right side of my chin, which was the first to find the floor, and what felt like a chill at the top of my spine, waiting to run down. But it didn’t. A minute or so later I was facing the mirror again; the chill had gone, the burning lingered, and I was trying to resume the relay while my eyes raced across every inch of the glass. The rest of the session was uneventful.
• I have a fucking heading.