Exclusive Excerpt from Between Bloody Lips

by Sai Fox

Memories were always something that had fascinated Gabriel.

There was something special about the way a human’s mind worked, how it was able to recall information from so long before. He’d read somewhere, in some article on some throwaway day that no longer mattered, that the mind wasn’t able to recall memories with perfect detail.

No; memory was less like a photograph and more like a Pablo Picasso in its mix of color and shapes. It was more like a Salvador Dali in how the edges of dreams and reality bled into each other to create its own unique picture, its own unique self.

Nothing was quite reality.

Nothing was quite fantasy.

Nothing was quite—

Perfect.

Maybe, just maybe, that was how Gabriel knew that this was a dream rather than a memory.

It was just…

Perfect.

Too perfect.

It was such a beautiful morning; the sun shined through the pale blue curtains over his window, the creamy white paint on the walls giving a soft, alluring glow to the room. There was a spider web stretched across the lower-left corner of the windowsill, the tattered edges blowing in a soft breeze that Gabriel could feel against the hairs on his arms.

His mind, idle and in that sweet place between wakefulness and the dead of sleep, couldn’t help but wonder: where was the spider? Where was it hiding?

Why was it hiding?

Something soft and niggling in the back of his mind tried to push the thought away. It didn’t matter. It didn’t exist, as far as Gabriel was concerned. After all, why would there be a spider in such a beautiful place, in such a beautiful dream?”

“Gabriel turned his attention away from the window and to the oak nightstand painted with little, pale pink flowers at the corners, a vase of freshly-cut daisies casting a shadow across the table.

They smelled like his childhood. They were the ones his mother had always kept right there on the bedside at their little beach house, their little getaway. She had undoubtedly gotten them that morning from the garden just outside his bedroom window.

She didn’t get them from anywhere. This is a dream. This is nothing but a dream.

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