Free Flashback by Amanda Carpenter

picked itself up and started to blindly climb again, this time on a different blade of grass. She wondered where it was going to, or if it even knew. “I didn’t hear you,” she said quietly.
    “And you weren’t afraid?” His tone was strange. She looked at him quickly and found him, not watching her as she’d suspected, but looking off into the wood as if he would see some answer to a vitally important question. He looked tired, and she realised that many of the lines on his face were from exhaustion, not age. He couldn’t be much older than thirty-five or so. It didn’t seem old to her. And she wondered with a bit of a jolt if she’d ever been young.
    “No,” she said, and this time the quietness in her voice was firm. “There was nothing in that night that would have hurt me.” She felt him relax and tried to guess at what she’d said to reassure him. Her eyes travelled to her hand, clasped in his. “Do you know,” she said, almost at random, “how fascinating mythology can be?” His attention caught, he turned his head to look at her, trying to figure out the change of subject. “I’ve just reread the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. Do you know it? I’ve always been struck at how he travelled all the way to Hades just to bring her back to life, because he loved her so.” Her eyes filmed over with dreaminess and she whispered musingly. “It seems everybody gets to some version of hell, some time in their life. I guess it’s just that some of them make it back.”
    It was as if she’d struck him, he was so still. And suddenly she was overwhelmed with the desire to get away from him, from everyone, and just be alone. She was so unused to having someone look at her exposure. She tugged her hand away and stood abruptly. “I’m sorry,” she said to him, voice slightly unsteady. His head had jerked up. She backed away. “Excuse me. I don’t mean anything personal about this, it’s just—just—I need to be by myself…” She looked at him pleadingly, and something in his eyes softened. “I know you wanted to talk, but c—could we leave it right now?”
    He just smiled a queer, twisted smile and said quietly, “You need time. You weren’t expecting anything like this, were you?” He hesitated. “Who am I to say one way or another, after all? You don’t mind me knowing, do you?”
    “I guess I do,” she said uncertainly. “But it’s not anything we have any control over anymore, is it? I—what was it you wanted to talk about, anyway?”
    She watched him as his face shuttered up and blanked every expression out, something coming over his thoughts like a dark blanket. She thought of those terrifying nightmares and the horrible dread when she woke from them, and she thought she understood. It wasn’t easy to talk about, those dreams. She’d never even told her mother what they were about. “You see?” she said, shrugging with a gesture that was unconsciously helpless. “You need time as much as I. Only,” and her eyes raised to the sun as something dark shadowed her vision, “only I can’t help but wonder how much time we have left.”
    She wasn’t even aware of how she had used the plural instead of singular in that last muttered statement, and though his head came up sharply and his eyes widened, he didn’t tell her.

Chapter Four
    Dana dragged her feet through the grass as she walked back to her house alone. She tried in vain to recapture some sense of peace or tranquility, some sense of what she’d been like last month, or a few weeks ago. She couldn’t. Something was changing in her, and it only partially had something to do with the nightmares that she was so mentally receptive to.
    It had quite a lot to do with David Raymond. He seemed to be the cause, or the catalyst for many of the unfamiliar feelings inside of her, and the differences. She’d reached a new plateau of living; she’d taken a step in growth, and it was a measure of her seclusion and isolation that she