Fata Morgana
an excerpt

Violet was beginning to question the very nature of being, due to those traumatic occurrences she’d been experiencing as of late. Since the night Rose had invited Magnus over for dinner that night that now seemed so long ago, the odd fading phenomenon she had experienced had recurred several times. Either she was losing her mind, or she was becoming a ghost a little at a time, fading out of existence molecule by molecule. She didn’t know for sure which it was, but at times she really wasn’t sure there was much of a difference. Both possibilities meant losing cohesion – dissolving and departing gradually over time – until you just weren’t there anymore. Violet knew that she hadn’t been truly present in the world for a long time, if she ever had been. Now she was paying for it. Her life… no… her existence… was being taken from her little by little by way of some invisible force that she did not understand and that she could not reason with, and she didn’t know what to do or how to fight it. Something told her that perhaps it wasn’t the type of thing that even could be fought, and just the simple act of thinking about it made it feel as if someone had closed ice cold, spectral fingers around her throat and begun to squeeze, steadily, firmly, and relentlessly.

The recurrences snuck up on her when she least expected them, so she doubted that she was somehow bringing them upon herself through panic attacks, or any other such phenomena. Sometimes the incidents were identical twins brothers and sisters to the ones she had already experienced before. She would be baking cookies, working in her garden, or seeing to the housework and suddenly she would feel dazed and ill – almost exactly like she was suddenly being pulled and stretched over time and space until she was so thin and insubstantial that she almost wasn’t there anymore – almost, but not quite. Then she would look down at her hands or her arms and realize that she could make out the shapes and patterns of whatever happened to lie beyond them at a given moment, whether it was the splintery roughness of the planks that made up the floor of the deck, the bright, sun yellow velvet of the daffodils in her garden, or the hairline cracks in the enameled finish of the little English cup she liked to drink her tea out of in the evenings.

Other times, it was more of a feeling, a mental state of being that felt foreign and jarring, like being hit in the face with a damp washcloth out of nowhere when you least expected it. It was a bit like lying in bed at night and feeling yourself slip into that place between conscious and unconscious where you still feel completely and utterly awake, yet there are alien thoughts passing through your head that almost don’t feel like yours, and it is these thoughts that tell you are actually nearly asleep – not completely, but so close to it that before you really have time to think about it, you will be. Violet felt as if she were slipping through the cracks in some universal floor, like a dust mote, a crumb, or a button that had fallen off of someone’s sweater and rolled out of sight long before its owner ever noticed it had gone missing -- only she wasn’t slipping through the crack that lies between awake and asleep. That transition moved in an eternal circle. You didn’t fear slipping into sleep, because you know that you would eventually come back to consciousness again with the sun shining through your windows, and a fresh piece of white paper stretching itself out before you, just waiting to be filled with the annals of your adventures over the next four-and-twenty hours. This was different. It was like slipping from life – breathing, walking, talking, loving – over into… something that Violet had yet to identify. It would be easier somehow if she knew she were going to die, but somehow this seemed so much more like simply ceasing to exist, and that seemed infinitely worse on so many levels. If you were dead, that would mean that you were once, that you existed – but this – this did not feel like something that would come with such a guarantee.