In between 6 and 7

In a room, dark and cold, her fingers freezing, she slowly scans left to right and realizes a place she knows, but cannot remember. Why am I here? She thinks. It has been so much time, too much time. "I need to turn on the light" She says aloud to no one. Suddenly light blooms from the far side of the room. It seems to be radiating from under the door. The warm bright glow reaching across the empty floor. It cuts a straight line through the center of the room and stops just before her bare feet. The entire door is now a silhouette and changing. From behind her, a new light appears, angry and red. She turns and is aware of flames that are just now flickering to life. They spread to the curtains around the blacked out window and reach upward in search of the ceiling. Panic grips her heart, laced with a deep longing pain that will not subside. She is frozen by the awful sight, her legs and arms refuse to respond. Somewhere deep inside she thinks it strange that she feels no heat. But the pain! The pain is so real her lip quivers and tears begin to fill her helpless eyes. It slices her into pieces as she stares at the flames that have now flowed like water across the ceiling. The room is painted by uneven light, yellow and red and black. She senses more than hears a voice call and she turns to see a man dressed in black with a face of fire staring from burning eyes. He speaks again…"Penelope. Why?" Her heart breaks as tears fill her eyes. "Tell me, why?" He asks again. She opens her mouth to respond and the scene is swept away. She is standing at the door, still rounded in bright light, her hand inches from the handle. She glances back and sees the man with the face of fire still looking with pained eyes of flames. She turns back and the handle to the door is now in her hand. She can feel the cold metal. Strange, too strange. She turns the handle and the latch gives, steps back as the door swings in. The light washes over her arms, her face, her body. She raises her right hand to shield her sensitive eyes. One step, two, running now. The light screams. The man screams. She screams only silence. The question haunts her mind, "Pen, Why?!!..." A breeze now sweeps her long hair across her face. Her eyes adjust and she is in a field of bright green. The grasses tickle the bottom of her left hand as it hangs by her side. The eternity of green stretches forever. No sound but the soft breeze through the grass. She turns, confused and the man, the fire, and the room are gone. Only a memory and a scent of burned wood hangs in the air. There is one tree, breaking the otherwise endless field, far in the distance. She approaches, noticing the sway and drift of the breeze across the green field leading her forward. As she nears the lonely tree she sees it is twisted and burned, a deep featureless charred black. Tears fill her eyes again and she falls at the foot of the tree and buries her face into her hands. A whisper carries a soft voice to her heart. "Why?"

She awakes in strangling tangled sheets, her hair matted to her head by the sweat of the dream. Her eyes burn with the last remnants of tears. Her heart pounds in rhythm to the racing of her mind. Her head throbbing a counter point to her heart. She thinks to herself, that seemed too real. She still feels the pain in the man's eyes bearing into her. As her pulse slows and settles and her breath becomes measured, she remembers the striking similarity that the black room bears to the hotel she lived in while still in Los Angeles years ago. Why was the room on fire? She wonders. Remembering the face of the man on fire even as the dream fades from her mind, a chill runs the length of her spine to the hairline of her neck. Something about that face seems so familiar, but the harder she tries to picture it without the fire, to see the man beneath, the faster it seems to fade. Finally, with the last thought, what time is it, she settles back down and drifts to an exhausted sleep.