Alex Stern

When she falls asleep, she dreams of Hellie.

Hellie with her beautiful blonde hair and her strong athlete's stance and her big, ugly feet. Sweet, clever, dead Hellie. In the dream, Hellie is alive, and she's swinging a bat, the bat, still splattered with blood and brain-matter, in wide, careless arcs. In real life, that bat had been broken into splinters, and Hellie had opened her hands, opened Alex's hands, and given it to the river but here, in the dream, it's still whole and terrible as it ever was.

"Hey, Alex," says Hellie, swinging the bat again. "How's life?"

Between one blink and another, everything changes - Hellie teeming wiht life becomes Hellie already going blue around the edges, vomit in her hair. Dead in the night. Alex feels tears rolling hot down her cheeks.

"Jesus, Hellie," she mumbles. "Jesus."
She doesn't know how to tell Hellie how much she loved her. In the dream, she hopes she knows.

"Here," says Hellie, holding out the bat. Cold terror spikes through her and she shakes her head.
"I don't want that," she says. "Don't...Hellie, please..."

"You don't have a choice, Galaxy," says Hellie, her blue eyes soft and sad and forever away. "You never did. Just take the fucking bat."

So, in the way of dreams, Alex reaches out and takes the bat and she wakes up, with Hellie's name on her lips and the bloodied bat stil in her hands.

"Oh, fuck," she says, her panicked brain rabbiting, bouncing off the insides of her skull, panic begging for release.