I wake up. The air is brisk and sweet, cooling to the tears on my cheeks. I shiver in the blanket, its warmth engulfing me into its chasm and replacing all memory with a rewarding heat.
I feel nothing but it’s embrace for a few short minutes. All knowledge and idea is misplaced inside my skull. My thoughts are darted, so slow in movement that they haven’t collected to recognition and sway about unnoticed and unlived.
The moment, the minutes leave sooner than they deserve. I recall everything in time with my heart beat. The nightmare, the night terror is soon replayed in my mind. The horror is shown, the colours of my room soon fade and the negative film of my internal voice plays.

*

The plane shoots out of the sea, followed by the flying fish that come up and dive back to the sea with the plane. Down here the pods that we sit in allow us to see the nature of our ocean. The reef is alive with the colours of its majesty. The schools of fish, like locus swoop and spread.
We wave up and shoot up from the water to the red dawn sky again. The flying fish follow.
My mother, sleek and slender, turns to me with her forgiving brown eyes. My memory tells me this is not her. Her face is to wrong, to distant from the ignorance and guilty charms my mother has. But I know, somehow deeper than my memory lives in my mind, that this is her.
She speaks, her soft red lips parting to commune with me. Her voice is harsh, thorn like. Its tone is my mother, in a calm rage that has become her icon in my thoughts. She tells me she must, that she has no choice. She says her conscience wont let her say no, that she has tried and she has lost. She says she must to save her. A tear drops from her eyes, travelling down her white pearl skin to her cheeks where it falls to the floor.
A small girl, with red hair as dark as blood turns to face the conversation. She cries out a whine that shakes my bones.
My mother begs her not to cry. She falls to her knees and looks her in the eye. She whispers that she loves her, that she will do anything for her and that she has to do this. She says she has decided.
The plane lands. Outside is a warehouse with a large green cross. The doors of the pod opens and my mother and me float to the ground, holding onto the arms of the girl. We reach the ground with a deep thud .
My mother pulls me and the girl to the warehouse. She says thank you to me as we walk in. Inside is the doom. I feel the temperature fall far below zero. The air stings as I breath it in, burning my lungs to a chard pain.
Two lines, separated by a long gate run a pilgrimage to two large red blobs. Their texture is strange and curious. Like a square jelly has mated with a plastic bag, it wobbles yet has a still presence. My mother kisses me on one cheek and walks to one line. The girl cries as my mother leaves for the line then she joins the other. I stand back and wait.
My mother reaches the blob. It towers high up above her head. She breathes slowly, takes her time before she lifts up her hands and touches the substance. It attacks her skin, joining it the moment she feels its painful warmth.
It spreads around her, devouring her into its presence. She collapses as its sucks her in. Her head is the last to be consumed, her eyes look at mine without a ray of her in them as the blob takes her in whole.
The girl reaches her line and is taken in like mother was. I watch as she grabs its surface. It wraps itself around her hand. She tries to pull it off only to have her other hand taken.
She yells no, screams for help. Her voice is painful, sick and ill. I don’t move from where I am. I listen but remain steady. She is taken in and the yelling stops.

My mother is the first to awake. Her hand pushes far out off the blob. She brakes through its membrane and pulls herself free of the jelly. Her breathing is machine like. Paced and roaring each lung full sounds like an engine. She stands, her skin dripping with the gel off the blob. She doesn’t look at me, she ignores my existence.
She walks to a lagoon filled with a bubbling green liquid. She takes a first step into the lagoon. Her foot slips and she falls head first. I don’t move, I wait for the girl.
Mother pulls herself up out of the liquid. Her face is burnt. He eyes, skull and teeth are all that remain on her head. All other flesh has been taken.
Her eyes are now blue, like they are to me each day. She looks at me with them, scanning me whole as she sinks into the liquid crying with a burst from her dissolving lungs.

*

And then I wake.