Strangling A Snowman

She had a jar by her bed – to catch the dreams, she said.

I was a neutral scanner. I was once her sinner, but now her sin-eater. I did not know her name, although I seemed to know everything else about her. Her scanty future. Her even scantier past. Her childhood. Her shadowy parents and those other shadowy figures and less shadowy figures that populated her life. Some were friends, some enemies. Many were neither. 

I never guessed that I was one of her dreams - a dream that the  jar could never catch, because the emptiness it held and used as bait to catch her dreams did not entice me as much as other dreams.

The others were caught by the jar.

And their punishment? To form the emptiness again … become no more.

Dreams were nightmares. Every dream, even nice ones, became nightmares in the end. The jar caught them and neutralised them. Except me. I was already neutral – that's why the emptiness could not entice me.

The figures were white – and she knew she was right.

The shadowy figures that populated her real life I – as her scanner - left her side to follow.

I took advantage of the time she was in deep dreamless slumber to leave off guarding her and followed shadowy figures that had populated her waking hours. These were her many exes. Those who had loved and left and broken her heart. These shadowy figures were white, a fact that was disguised by the shadows that covered them like religious veils.

The shadows themselves were white. Therefore I had to recognise them as real shadows from their aura.

 
When I was gone – she snored along.

Despite hating them all, there was one among the shadowy figures who really tried to dig deep beneath my veneer of ordinary hate to turn it into extraordinary hate. He was a cheat. A cad. A blackguard. Worse than I'd ever been. His wispy drapes were more like embedded china clay than shattered shadow.

He hid himself beneath a white frozen mould of misshapen humanity, a pipe stuck in his mouth as a disguise, and eyes that had once been spent as shillings. I followed him in earnest. I wanted to spend my misspent youth in stealing his age or experience (once filtered of its evil) to give myself back some semblance of life or of provenance. Then I could truly love her as she deserved to be loved, once woken into the snowlit world that surrounded the house she slept within. She would then refill the jar with emptiness and sleep again, a peaceful sleep of the innocent, with me inside her bed, instead of out. That was an innocent ambition with which even one like me beset by the diversion of extraordinary hate could foster.

She stirred – what she heard?

I had lost track of my prey amid the other shadowy figures that innocently acted as subterfuge or decoy for that dire cad's own re-tracking to the room where she slept, without me knowing. The forest of night was cliffed with sheer wastes of frosty smoothness. I drifted amid the wide white beacons of shadow, seeking the one I wished to strangle with my own bare and frozen hands to rescue my heroine.

The jar was not just empty, it was no jar at all but Cone Zero.

She had awoken out of it – herself  become her own special hero.

I crept away from him, not wishing to interfere with a bad love poem – especially with my extraordinary hate recognised as motiveless madness too late.

I had not even been a good scanner, judging by the forced half-rhyme with sinner. Not even an excuse for alexandrine or assonance. No-man, snowman.  Even I couldn’t strangle sense from nonsense.