Deus Ex Machina

Debra liked the demented, the dark and the surreal. It reflected her personality. From a young age, she’d realized there was no such thing as happy endings. The pursuit of happiness was for the delusional.

To the world, she presented a hard, been knocked around, can take care of myself, so don’t fuck with me veneer. She didn’t believe in fairy tales -- unless they were told by Tim Burton. Yet, in the back of her mind, she harboured the faint hope that there might be a happy ever after for her. Of course, she never allowed anyone to see this hopefulness.

So, now, here she was lying on a white sand beach. She couldn’t remember how she got there.

She looked down at herself. She was dressed all in white; white slacks, white blouse, white pumps. She strained to remember something – anything. It was surreal; a scene from the Twilight Zone. Wasn’t there a scene like this in Contact where Jodie Foster’s character meets her dead father on a beach? Maybe she was dead. Maybe she was dreaming. That’s it – a dream – it must be a dream. Well, if that was the case, she’d just go with it.

Down the beach, she could see a dark shape against the whiteness of the sand. As there was nothing else around, she took a step towards it. In an instant, she found herself looking down at the body of a black Arabian, lying on its side – the same horse she’d sketched over and over in countless notebooks as a child; when she still had dreams of happiness; before her mom’s death; before the anger and constant black cloud.

A kaleidoscope of her life played back at her in the sheen of the Arabian’s coat; the self-destructive behaviour, the failed marriages, the sabotaged relationships, the sorry state of her self-imposed loneliness. Maybe she really was dead. But wasn't there anything good about her life?

A fluttering movement caught her attention. She turned around to see a multi-coloured hot air balloon. It hadn’t been there a moment ago. That’s the thing about death dreams, she thought – they don’t need to make sense.

Across the breeze, a pure light-as-air voice was singing, “Some day my prince will come . . .”

Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.


For Sunday Scribblings, "Happy Ending" and Dan Wiencek's 13 Writing Prompts

(This is probably one of the weirdest pieces I've done. All I had was Dan Wiencek's last sentence, the Sunday Scribbling’s prompt of “Happy Ending” and my own self-imposed word limit. I had no idea how I’d get there until I got there.)