“Daddy?” she asks, unable to see him, though she can feel him there.

“Yes, my sweet.”

He takes her arm in his hand. A soft rub and a painful prick.

She yelps. “Daddy, I’m scared!”

He shushes her. “You are fine, Vanilla. I am here.”

Another rub. Another painful prick.

“Daddy, it hurts!”

“I know, I know,” he says.

The painful prick slips out from beneath her skin. Her vein throbs after its removal. Isn’t it that veins throb? she thinks. Isn’t that what Daddy told me?

He says, “But it is over now. You are safe, my sweet.”

I can’t remember . . . The blue snakes . . . don’t they throb?

He lies her down carefully on the mattress and hums to her until his hums sound like long, distant echoes. She feels the sleepiness slowly creep across her body, slithering through her veins until it reaches her every limb. It climbs up her spine and eats away at the new memories that are working so hard to store themselves in her brain; instead, save for a few, they are consumed. Soon, she can no longer keep her eyes open. The difference between them open and shut is barely discernible.

The last thought she has before she falls into a heavy sleep is if this is what her stuffed blue dog feels like.

CHAPTER III

When she wakes, the room is bright again.

She shields her eyes with her tiny hand, controlling the slow increase of light flooding back to her senses as she adjusts. Apprehensively, she removes her hand and faces the light in full. She would have thrown another tantrum, enraged at thinking she had won only to be fooled by the light’s return, if not for the fact that the light is different. No longer white and flickering, but yellow and warm. The new hue makes the room look calmer and brand new. She likes the way it gives a new shade to the walls and to the floor. She looks up. Now, instead of a dangling lightbulb that taunts her by being just a few jeering, unreachable feet above her head, a long, glowing tube is glued flat to the ceiling.

She smiles.

Everything has been returned to its place, the room immaculate. But she remembers what it looked like before. She remembers her tantrum and how it covered everything in shadow and glass, even if her memory of it feels woozy.

It happened, didn’t it?

Even if her memory feels woozy . . . and groggy . . . and so distant from her, like the long echo of a doorway where (a shriek?) darkness finds infinity.

A shallow red mark lines her arm just below her shoulder, slight but still there. She touches it and winces.

It wasn’t just a dream . . . was it?

A moment before, she was so certain. Now, as time sets in, her mind churns her memories.

She gets up and tiptoes over to the center of her room, careful not to step on any glass, real or imagined, and sits by her toys. She meets nothing sharp along the way.