Falling Under by Gwen Hayes

the distraction of her that morning. She was the opposite of my father—all soft hugs and easy tears. She always smelled like lemons and brown sugar.
    For want of something to do to keep me from thinking, I pulled out my violin, but was unable to coax a single note from it. After putting it away, I considered reading, but the words couldn’t hold my attention either. I was restless and because of it, the stillness of the house ceased being lonely and instead became oppressive.
    I powered up the computer in the study, determined to wrest back some of the control I felt I’d abandoned since the night I saw, or thought I saw, the burning man fall from the sky. I Googled “waking dreams” first. Bypassing personal journals, I found a medical site that spoke of sleep paralysis and began to relax even though the word “paralysis” was frightening. A medical explanation of my symptoms, one that didn’t indicate poor health or psychotic imbalance, was very welcome indeed.
    It all seemed to fit quite nicely. In the old days, there were folktales that explained the phenomenon. A woman—sometimes a hag, sometimes a beautiful demon—would kneel on the chest of a man and paralyze him, taking his life force or some such. Sometimes she was called Mara—as in “nightmare.” The man couldn’t move until she let him up.
    But really, it was explained easily by modern medical facts. Sometimes people were unable to transition smoothly from deep sleep to wakefulness. In a deep sleep, the body relaxes the muscles so as not to flail about and hurt himself while dreaming. A person who becomes lucid while in this sleep state will not be able to move, and it is during this time that hallucinations occur. The mind is awake, but the body is still locked in sleep.
    I sighed with relief. Though my dreams felt real to me because I was partially awake, I had never really left my bed. Excellent.
    And then I thought of the rose hidden in my drawer and the petals on my bed this morning. They could not be explained by sleep paralysis.
    Not ready to give up, I next Googled “lucid sleepwalking,” though where I would have found a black rose while sleepwalking I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t know where to get one even while conscious, and Father certainly didn’t cultivate them on the grounds. Unfortunately, the most relevant Web sites agreed that sleepwalkers don’t remember their fugue states, and I remembered every detail of mine very vividly.
    I wasn’t prepared to abandon the explanation entirely. The Internet is not the most reliable source of information, after all. The things I saw on my sleepwalking travels must have worked their way into my dream state. I nodded at my own rationalization and searched for “black roses . ” It was then I learned that black roses don’t exist in nature.
    That was impossible. I’d held the rose, smelled its strange fragrance; it was right now drying in a drawer. The petals were not silk or man-made. The flower was real, and yet it could not exist.
    Questions swirled around my brain and I found myself thinking about denial. I squeezed my eyes closed, accepting what I’d been trying so hard to reject. There was no use pretending.
    A memory nagged at me. I hadn’t been asleep in the sunroom while playing the violin a few days ago, and Father had clearly seen me while, in my mind, I was in the labyrinth. If I was somehow traveling to another place, why wasn’t the rest of me going too? I typed “out-of-body experience” into the computer.
    The scope of results was too large. There were so many different beliefs—astral projection, spirit walkers, soul travelers. I had to close the window. I thought of Varnie. He was likely my best source of information.
    I showered and dressed in record time. Now that I’d decided to embrace getting educated, I was in a hurry to do so. I was giddy on my walk across town. I even promised myself not to flinch if he wanted to read the cards again.
    Bounding up the steps