When I was six, my house burned down.

Everyone was fine, don't worry. The smoke alarm went off, the dog came rushing to my room to help me downstairs in the smoke, my dad was working late, my mom was coming out of her bedroom as I made it to the ground floor. She was a little unsteady on her feet, but we all got outside safe and sound.

Old house, old wiring, good security system. Fire and ambulance were there, I was brought in for observation but there was nothing wrong with me, got a grape-flavoured sucker and a three-month hotel stay out of it, which six-year-old me thought was kind of fun for about five days and then got super bored without any of my toys or local friends around. My mom had to drive me in special trips to the park near our house just so I could see my neighbours.

When we moved back in, right before the school summer break, the house was very different. The old one was gone, the new one didn't feel quite the same. The layout had changed, it was all bigger, and the shadows weren't quite right at night.

That's when the nightmares started.

I had always been a good sleeper, according to my mom. Didn't give her much trouble as a baby. Was good as a little kid. But after we went back home, the fire would come back. It would chase me like a monster down a long dark hallway. The only light was from the fire. I would feel the heat coming closer and closer, and then I'd wake up, covered in sweat and shaking and crying, usually having thrown off my blankets.

It wasn't every night, but it was at least once a week. It got worse if I had a bad day, or if my mom wasn't home, or if my parents were fighting. They never came when I slept over at friend's places, though, so I had a lot of slumber parties in my tween and teen years. That wasn't the only reason, of course, it was often just nice to get out of a house where people were constantly stressed out and complaining. But I couldn't sleep away all the time, and so... There was fire.

When I lay back on my bed with soft music drifting in my ears, I was not expecting the fire to be there, but there it was.

I was in a calm space, a quiet place. Lying back on the grass, staring up at the sky.

I noticed the smoke, first. It wasn't campfire-smoke. It smelled like my house burning.

Instinct took over and I jumped to my feet, and started running away from the heat. Constantly on the go. Dodging branches and rocks. Knowing that the fire was just behind me, every twist and turn of the way.

Then I was flying. Nightmares weren't the only dreams I could have, and flying dreams were generally fantastic. But I looked down from where I was flying and I could see myself running on the ground, too, and the bright flames behind me, and I didn't understand.

I soared over the scene, willing myself to go faster, and faster, to get away from the flames, to stay ahead, somehow, from the onrushing fire. I looked around for help, and I couldn't see anything.

I could hear, though.

Like an angelic chorus from the sky. Soft, feminine, shining voices all around me. Even as I could feel the terror from my other self rushing ahead of the fire, even as I could see the smoke drifting below, even as I could feel the heat even up that high, I could hear a song, beautiful and exotic and entrancing. And the words drifted out of the wordless song, words finally I could understand as the flames slowed ever so slightly and my grounded-self picked up the pace to get a few steps further away and it looked like we might make it:

"We cannot call one such as you."

Slowly, very slowly, I felt gravity take hold, and I couldn't keep myself in the air. I started to fall towards the smoke and the heat, and—

A knock on my door woke me with a sudden shock. I had kicked away covers I hadn't even been covered with. I had curled up without pants, but I had stripped off my boxers at some point in my thrashing, and my shirt was pulled up uncomfortably high. I was sweating profusely.

The voices still rang in my ears, along with the soft thump of the music. Something about the fire, the heat, the nudity, the choir, the exhilaration of flying, the terror of running away... Maybe about the whole situation, maybe because I hadn't been with anyone for over a year, whatever, I was terribly horny.

There was another knock on my door. "You okay?" Kammy's voice drifted into my room.

"Uh, um, y-yeah," I stammered, sitting up, putting my hands under my bare butt to keep them from drifting.

"Yeah, well, uh, it's suppertime, and I came to knock on your door, and it sounded like you were screaming." There was a pause. "And then singing?"

"Having a nightmare," I answered back. I scrambled to find my shorts. "I'll be out in a sec."

"'Kay, want me to wait for you?"

Yes, desperately. "No, I'm good, thanks, I'll just be a minute and then I want to get myself straightened up."

"All good, I'll save you a seat then."

"Yeah thanks."

I continued looking for my shorts, that had been not only kicked off the bed with the covers but somehow got wrapped up in them. I could be done in five minutes, I thought to myself. Maybe faster. There was only one problem with my line of reasoning: I had never in my life cum quietly. My best efforts at being quiet resulted in me concentrating too much on that to get off, and my second-best efforts were, let's say, not subtle. At home, I had to wait for an empty house, which was difficult since my parents remarried and I had three young step-brothers on my mom's side and two obnoxiously nosy dogs on my dad's. At school... Late at night, I could get away with it, the walls between rooms were pretty solid, but if there was anyone in the hall or the lounge... I only rarely risked it.

I wished I could right then, but I got dressed, rushed to the bathroom to give myself a cold splash in the face and calm down, and untangle my hair from the mess it had got itself into. One of the main reasons I kept it fairly short was because it would get tangled up so badly every night, so it was just simpler. Plus I liked it. It had a nice bounce to it, it framed my face, it didn't attract too much attention when I didn't want it to. I ran my brush through it, then played a bit with a curl that drifted past my ear. I toyed with it for a moment, smiling, thinking about my ex; he used to enjoy fiddling with that bit of my hair when I was on top of him, before we got too worked up to worry about those little sentimental gestures.

This did nothing whatsoever to help with my unresolved horniness, but it did at least help me calm down a little. I could trade one for the other. Once my heart rate was under control I could manage the desperation much more easily.

We cannot call one such as you.

I didn't generally put a lot of stock in dreams, especially since I was prone to recurring nightmares, but those words were... fascinating. I didn't know what they meant. My brain could have been free-associating something, I guess, but it seemed so specific. I walked back to my room to put my earrings back in and throw on a bit of makeup, thinking about those seven words.

Who was "We"?

What was this "Call"?

Why can't they call?

What does that mean, "One such as me"?

Why would I fall when I heard them sing that?

What exactly was lurking in my subconscious that might prompt my brain to do that to me?

Questions still ringing in my mind like that choir as, now properly attired and made up, I headed down the stairs. Our dorm didn't have a kitchen, just a couple vending machines on each floor, so we usually ate at the bigger residence just down the street. Our meal cards worked at any cafeteria on campus, so it didn't really matter, that was just the closest and, as far as most of us were concerned, the best. Most mornings, even in the winter, a small train of women from our dorm could be seen moving along the sidewalk in nightgowns or pyjamas for our coffee and toast.

The last afternoon sun was still warm and the breeze only had the slightest hint of the autumn in it. I could maybe have put something on that exposed a little more skin, but I liked being warm, more than I cared about sweating. A few people were out and about, but things were still pretty quiet. It would get busier when classes were in full swing, of course, as people finished moving in, as communities started growing together like they always did, and as students figured out how they wanted to spend what free time we had.

The brief walk cleared my head a little, though that dream of the fire still lingered with me. Especially that song. I would have to sketch something about that when I got back after dinner.

The cafeteria was buzzing with conversation, which made it hard to find Kammy. It sounds contradictory, or impossible, or just wrong, but loud, constant noise makes it harder for me to process visual information. I'm not alone in it, just particularly lousy with it, and when you add in a difficulty recognizing faces from a distance, I couldn't spot my friend on entering the dining hall. I shrugged and headed to the food line, meal card in hand; Kammy could, and probably would, find me.

I walked past Rita, sitting with a few other girls I knew from the dorm, all theatre students. The four of them were laughing good-heartedly, no doubt telling stories of their summers. Rita's eyes caught mine as I walked by, and she gave me a little wave.

The fire in her eyes sent a wave of remembered heat through me, a call back to the dream and the chorus still echoing in my head. I waved back weakly and kept moving along with the line.

I had to write about it. I knew that. The dream, the fire, the look. Everything.

My sketchbooks and pencils were in my room, in my luggage. Too far.

Kammy stepped up beside me, giving me a little jolt from my thoughts when she spoke. "Hey sister, gonna join us for dinner?"

I looked up at her, and over at the table she was indicating, with two other girls from the dorm—July, a bouncy blonde computer science student who I got along with pretty well, and Reese, an older, soft-hearted Inuit studying chemistry like Kammy—and my heart was torn. "God, I want to," I said.

"What stopping you?" Kammy asked, moving forward with me. It was a genuine question.

I shook my head. "I dunno. My head's still fuzzy, the nightmare, the noise... I dunno," I repeated. "I kinda just want to be alone for a bit?"

Kammy nodded her understanding. "See you in the lounge later?"

I sighed in relief, pressure off. "Yeah, absolutely. Not like I've got any papers due yet."

"I'm sure we'll all be there soon," Kammy said, giving me a little pat on the shoulder that she couldn't know felt like flames. "I'll pass on your regrets."

"Thanks," I said to her back as she returned to her meal.

The general slowness of the cafeteria staff giving me my chicken fingers and Caesar salad made me twitchy as I waited. There were ideas to write down! But they didn't seem at risk of running away; on the contrary, the burning in my mind seemed to sear off the sharp edges, the distracting pathways, creating a slowly emerging clarity that I knew would stay there at least long enough for me to get it down.

Bamboo fork and knife in my right hand with my phone case, and a clamshell container full of food in my left, I immediately turned around and went back to my temporary home that felt more like home than my supposedly permanent one.

Up the stairs and into my little monastic cell. The food, utensils, and phone were dropped on the desk, and I dove right into my suitcase, looking for my pink unicorn sketchbook. A pink cover, a little bigger than looseleaf pages, covered in stickers of rainbows, hearts, and, yes, unicorns. Blank, unruled pages, half of them filled with my scribblings. I don't just write down ideas, I can't. That's not the point. I'm trying to capture a moment, an emotion, a scene, a sensation. My sketches are messes of random words, images, coded language, even 'wrong' letters, and the point is just to get down everything I'm feeling and develop an idea before I put it into story form. My drawings aren't good in the least, but that isn't the idea. They're not meant to be shared, not meant to be seen; they're meant to be inspiration, by inspiration, and for inspiration.

I slammed the book down on the desk, opened to the first blank page, then headed back to the luggage to get drawing implements.

A memory surfaced from a movie of an actress, a comedienne, talking about flames on the sides of her face. I grabbed my phone, looked it up. Madeleine Khan. Clue. 1985. Wow, older than I thought. I'd have to watch the movie. Clue, what I didn't have about that dream. I was drawing and writing. Letter that looked like fire. Smoke that looked like words. Clouds and my barely-better-than-a-stick-figure image of myself soaring through them melded into half-sensible poetry scrawled in a combination of English and a made-up French-like language, and back down into trees before finishing itself.

By the time I took the second bite of my chicken, it had cooled to room temperature. Didn't matter, it was still good. I brushed breading crumbs off the page and started scribbling again. Nothing made sense so I literally made nonsense doodles in the corner. I used the pencil in my left hand, making the resulting image even weirder, as I kept chomping away at the chicken, trying not to rush anything, against my pressing instincts.

I decided that the salad could wait.

All in with both hands, I was scratching and writing and sketching, turning the book and twisting my thoughts into something that no one but me would recognize as anything resembling anything at all. Like most pages in the book, it was nonsensical, and like all those pages, I could tell exactly what I wanted to convey from it, even if no one else ever could. I paused when my pencil, going over the same line for the seventh time, pierced the page, and I realized I was pressing too hard.

I grabbed the next chicken finger and contemplated my work, and then realized I was pressing too hard for a reason.

The scar in the page was a wound in the word 'Ash,' the downward stroke of the 'h' that was flowing into a symbol that meant 'smoke,' to me, at the top of the trees. The injury I'd done to my sketch was part of what I had to convey, had to impart, using only words and without the benefit of translating that damage to a reader. I started to wonder, munching on cool chicken, what exactly had driven me to that kind of paporial violence, before wondering if 'paporial' was a word. It was a feeling that I wasn't sure I could put into words, but I was sure going to try.

That 'h,' with the 's' before it, also formed the word 'such,' with a little arch over the text. Which was naturally part of the text emerging from the smoke and drifting into the clouds, which echoed the chorus' words in symbolic text. 'Such' was probably the only word that someone other than me could recognize. As I finished the last of the chicken, it occurred to me that the slash in the page wasn't there because of the ash, but because of the song, and I had to question why one line of half-remembered melody from a dream made me angry enough to pierce my sketchbook.

I didn't have an answer.

Well, whatever. I could incorporate that confusion into the writing. It would add ambiguity, and ambiguity was in at that moment. It was something the professors in my past years stressed; not everything needed to be completely explained. And that was definitely true to life. Still, I would have liked a little more explanation about my own anger, my feelings of being... left out. I didn't know what I was being left out of, let alone why I was left out, which meant I didn't understand being upset.

I checked the time on my phone, and decided the rest could wait; I'd already spent two hours on my sketch. I grabbed my mostly-untouched salad and the weird wooden utensils I couldn't really get used to and headed out to the common area, looking for some company. Being a part of a group meant that I wasn't being left out, right?

Kammy and July were there, and they greeted me warmly. Now that the sketch was out and in my book, it was easy to let go, and I settled into easy conversation with my friends, with dreams of fire and confusing songs left behind me.