Gremelmayr
an excerpt

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
- Alfred Lord Tennyson

PREFACE

The night I told my grandmother about the end of my most recent illness, I resolved to write down the story of everything that had happened since the beginning of the summer holidays.

Well, perhaps not everything. Just the important parts.

It’s an odd story, happy and sad and terrifying and full of crazy things that shouldn’t be able to happen. Even I have to admit that everything I’ve seen and experienced since that hazy first day of summer is completely insane. Maybe I’m insane. Maybe I dreamed all of it, though that’s unlikely. At least some of it was real.

Dreams don’t leave you with physical scars, or bad cases of the flu.

“I had a really high fever and I was hallucinating.” I told her, twirling my fork absentmindedly between my fingers. We had finished dinner an hour ago and launched straight into conversation, forgetting dishes and cutlery immediately. It was always like this when I stayed with my grandparents; my grandmother was one of only a few people I would ever confide this sort of thing to.

“All the patterns in the wallpaper were moving like snakes. It scared me so much that I had to look away. On the other side of the bed, there were two people standing very close together, talking in low voices. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I knew they were talking about me.”

“One was a man, probably about mid-twenties, very handsome, with dark hair and blue eyes. The other was a girl of about my age with the reddest hair I’ve ever seen.” Trystan and Susanna. “The girl reached out to touch my head and the guy watched on. He looked really tense and worried. She was muttering something I couldn’t understand, and just as her fingers were about to touch my skin, my fever broke. They disappeared.”

Very seriously, my grandmother met my eyes. “They must have been your guardian angels.”

I felt tears sting at the back of my eyes at the idea. She was close to the truth- they looked after me, Trystan and Susanna, made life as a misfit much more bearable. And I had once thought their existence about as debatable as that of angels.

Inside my head, I heard Trystan laugh incredulously, making me grimace. My grandmother caught the expression.

“You don’t believe in guardian angels?”

“I don’t think my angel does.” I smiled weakly, inwardly promising him that he would be in trouble later. Of course, I understood all too well why he laughed; Trystan Gremelmayr was far from angelic. Before I met him, he had committed evils that made me shudder to think about, that surely barred his way to the conventionally accepted version of heaven for all eternity. Despite that, perhaps because of it, I loved him with all my heart.

For all its peculiarities, my story is not unique in theme. Mine is a love story at heart, and people fall in and out of love all the time. Some even find the one soul who is perfectly matched to theirs in every way. I did. I’m probably the only person that ever lived who met their true love in their dreams.