Page 9 of Lifebound

The nightmare startedlike it always did. I was surrounded by snakes and they were all coming to get me, and I was all alone in the woods with nowhere to hide.

Pretty standard stuff.

Then they bit me,allof them at the same time, and nobody came to save me. I screamed and screamed when I fell to the ground and I tried to get them off me. So many. Soreal,the whole thing, even though I always knew that I was dreaming. I always knew. It just never made any difference.

When I woke up, I was breathing heavily and covered in sweat from my head down to my toes.

Fuck, that was intense.

Had I screamed?

My heart stood still for a moment and I strained my ears…

Nobody was running out of their bedrooms yet, so I determined that I hadn’t made a sound this time.Good.

Now, I just needed a moment to calm down. I’d been here before, so many times. That nightmare was awfully real to me because it had happened. That day had actually happened—or so my brain insisted. It wasn’tthe same thing,obviously—I was still here. But the woods in that warm late August day, the rich colors of the trees, the smell of pines in the air, the warm sunlight streaming into the meadow where I liked to sing and dance by myself.

All of those things were the same in the dream as they had been in real life.

The meadow was far from our house, but back then it hadn’t felt so far to me. Mom and Dad always said to stay close, and one of them was always near the back to watch me play. But then one day I’d been very sad after burying a snail I’d stepped on accidentally while playing. Dad was sitting in the back, reading on his tablet and watching me, until Fiona, only a few months old, started screaming, so he went to check on her. Mom had gone to get groceries, and so for a few moments, I was all alone.

And in those moments, I thought I saw a squirrel watching me.

In need of a distraction to get rid of the guilt for killing the snail, I chased it.

That’s how I accidentally came upon the meadow.

I told my parents it was much closer than it actually was, of course, and I went back for weeks without trouble. I never stayed long as to not worry them because I thought myself all grown up already. I would turn six years old in just a few more months, after all.

On that specific day I still had nightmares about, I danced in the sunlight for a while, and I made a tiara of the pretty wildflowers—and I got bitten by a snake right over my ankle.

Brown—that’s all I’d seen moving near my foot. Brown scales just for a second, and then nothing. I’d screamed so much I could feel the pain in my throat even today. That’s why my hands were around my neck as I watched the sun climbing in the sky from my bedroom window now. Except I’d been so far into the woods that nobody could hear me, and the snake was maybe gone, but maybe it would come back.

The problem was that I couldn’t move. Within minutes, it had paralyzed my right side completely and I hadn’t even made it out of the meadow.

When I’d had no more voice left to scream with, I’d stopped. I’d rested my head on the grass and I’d closed my eyes and I’d waited to die. Even though I’d been young, so young, I knew it was over for me, and all I could think about was Mom’s smiling face.

Maybe because it brought me comfort. Maybe because she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Maybe because I still felt her kisses all over my face any time I closed my eyes.

Alone, I waited.

Then he came.

I heard the twigs snapping underneath his feet as he approached, and my eyes opened only barely. I thought for sure it was Mom coming to get me, but instead I saw the face of a boy—the most unusual boy I had ever seen.

Pale face, golden hair combed back, golden eyes and red lips—and his ears were pointy, too. He approached me slowly like he expected me to jump him. Like he couldn’t tell that I couldn’t move my body at all.

“Who are you?” he said, and his voice was soft. That’s what I remembered—soft.

“N-Nilah,” I said, stuttering because my jaws were so hard to move, too.

“Why are lying there?” the boy asked, then spun around in a circle, looking at the trees surrounding us. The clothes he wore were strange, too, dark red and threaded with gold everywhere. “Where are your parents?”

“Snake,” I thought I said. “A snake bit me.” Or maybe I said something else—this part I remembered poorly.

But the next, where the boy kneeled in the grass and pushed the blades away, then looked down at my body until he found my leg—this part I remembered perfectly.

He was otherworldly. An animation, like the ones that played on TV. I’d seen enough videos to think he wasn’t real, that it wasjust for videos,like Mom said.None of that stuff you see on YouTube is real, honey. It’s just for fun!

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