The steady, mechanical whirr of her breathing apparatus formed the background noise for most of her dreams. Sometimes it was the bustle of a busy street, sometimes the drone of bees in a field of wildflowers. Tonight it was a bubble machine. Thousands of bubbles had already been blown by the time she arrived. Though, where she had come from was not clear and if she stopped to think about it the bubbles clouded over her view until she was distracted by the swirling rainbow on the surface of each glistening, impossibly large bubble. When you prodded them they wobbled, and made little giggling noises as they scurried away, but they didn’t pop.



She plunged her head into a larger bubble- trying to fill it up with oxygen to see if it would behave differently, but the inside was made of ice. Her breath clouded about her eyes in a thick mist. The mist swirled and finally cleared to show an ice covered street. She knew this street. The bubbles continued swirling and giggling above her head but she ignored them, gliding across the ice on skates towards the stairs. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t stop herself. She dug in her heels, but it only served to make the skates shriek against the road beneath the ice.



The squeal of the kettle was abruptly shut off and she burned her fingers on the steam. He hated when it made a noise. But yet he demanded tea. She looked at her hands which were carefully measuring sugar and cream into a delicate china tea cup. They were shaking. The swirl of tea mixing with cream was the swirl of mist and the screaming skates drew her ever closer to the top of the stairs. The bubble machine was working harder and harder and the bubbles grew ever larger, landing all around her, on her, within her.



The top of the stairs and he was laughing and the skates were screaming and so was she but it was drowned out by the giggling bubbles, the largest of which was spreading within her abdomen, taking over her, pushing all the vital organs out of the way. She needed those. To live.



The sharp blade of the skate sliced the top step and it bled. She was falling. The tea was spilling. For every step she hit on the way down another bubble burst into hissing snakes until finally she was the bubble that popped. The teacup smashed. The laughing dulled to a throbbing in the back of her mind. In the forefront protestors although they had no faces and they were crying out in a language she didn’t understand.



She was cold and the ice was running up her legs and through her mind and most of all it was where her bubble wasn’t. It was over now, part of her knew it. Part of her knew the worst was yet to come. There was blood on the snow and echos of her textbook gore.



A giant clock loomed above the deflating bubbles but its hands were broken and it was trying to tick but every time the minute hand lifted if fell back with a dull slap like rubber gloves being thrown into the bin. Tick-slap. Tick-slap. The bubble machine droned on but all the mix was gone. The clock twitched lifelessly and the snow melted away to show the bare brown earth with not a blade of grass or a snowdrop to be seen. The husks of the bubbles lay scattered about like discarded saran wrap, the rainbows leeching off to become oil slicks on the street. A voice pierced the hum of the bubble machine and the clock’s slowed hiccoughing.



”You have to leave him.”



It was the knowledge that she had that woke her and she pulled the mask away from her face, silent sobs shaking her. Her arms clutched her stomach as she fought to keep the bile down. It was just a dream. Just a nasty, wicked dream.

There was a train waiting for her. Steam billowed from its stack and past her face. She knew she had to get on it, but she didn’t want to. It wasn’t a newfangled subway-type train, but an old steamer. It looked like it might have been clockwork as well, for it was covered in cogs and gears and a huge pocket watch nestled in the smoke stack. The tick of its hands matched the chug of the wheels.

Which was to say, time was frozen while she hesitated on the platform.

The carriages were all in darkness and shrouded by the steam. One of them looked like inside was the hospital consultancy room, but she couldn’t be sure. She was afraid to board the train, since it was going to an unknown location.

But the platform was crumbling into the sea. Already she was soaked to the waist from the waves crashing against it, every time more of the ground beneath her feet getting stripped away. The water was pulling at her feet, trying to trip her, trying to wash her away too. He was the sea. The tracks seemed dry, but they disappeared into a mirage-ish haze shortly in front of the train. Was it better to stay on the platform with the sea she knew than risk the unknown track?

She looked about for her luggage and found she had a stack of suitcases taller than herself. Her arms were broken, or at least they were in casts from palm to elbow, and she was in a hospital gown that looked like it had been half-soaked in blood rather than seawater. Was it her blood? She would never get the suitcases on to the train in time.

She snatched one of the cases and made the leap onto the train, which started moving even as she made her decision. The pocketwatch started ticking as the sea raged behind her. She wasn't the platform any more, she was the train.