Almost everyone eventually found their Calling.
Agatha Stone still considered herself young at nearly 30, but many thought it strange that she hadn’t had hers yet. It wasn’t impossible to have it until one was quite advanced in age – the oldest known instance had been with a couple well into their 50s. It was also possible to never have one. Some people committed suicide when they realized they were destined to be alone. Or in some cases, when the Calling told them that their partner had died before they could actually meet face to face – those were tragic tales. But it wasn’t something that bothered Agatha. She had never been interested in romance, so to her it seemed perfectly natural. Why would nature grant her visions of a soulmate when she wasn’t really romantically inclined? She had told her best friend as much once. “Oh, Ags. You only think you’re not interested because it hasn’t happened to you yet,” Tammy used to say, laughing and dismissively waving a hand at Agatha’s reasoning. But as many of their friends paired off or began to have the visions and dreams, Tammy’s dismissals became less frequent. Now, years after Tammy had met Alex and had her first child, she seemed to take Agatha’s explanation seriously. When friends asked, and Agatha explained, Tammy would nod, her expression serious. Some few rare individuals never paired off.
Agatha was comfortable with never finding her Calling.
And then she began having the nightmares.
In the first dream, there is a body laid out before her. The skin is peeled back from the neck down. This person has been flayed. The thought is terrifying. She feels her heart flutter at the back of her throat as she leans in close. The eyes in that blood-soaked face are glazed over, and she thinks whoever it is has to be dead, until the mouth hinges open, shuts, opens, shuts – there is only the faintest croak from a throat that has obviously screamed itself hoarse. Agatha jolts at the sudden movement, and wakes. At first she thinks she is hearing the scream from the body on the table before she realizes it’s her – she’s the one screaming.
She doesn’t know what inspired such a dream, and she feels uncomfortable sharing it with anyone.
A few weeks later, there is another dream. She recognizes the same table, the same body – this time, truly dead. It must be. The chest is cracked open and all the organs have been carefully removed. The mouth is open and head tilted back in a silent scream to the ceiling, the eyes wide and staring, pale and dry and truly lifeless. A part of her wants to bend over and be violently ill all over the floor but the other part of her is strangely fascinated, staring at the exposed musculature that is starting to dry. She feels something strangely like ecstasy, sees her hands move up the sides of the body and back down, gently tracing the line of a muscle and then running down the skin left at the hips. Although they aren’t really her hands – they’re larger, as though they belong to a man. The hands dip lower, and as she realizes what she is about to witness she wakes suddenly, sitting straight up in bed. She rolls over onto her side and pukes all over the floor.
The first dream could have been dismissed as some strange figment of her brain, some nightmare inspired by a horror movie. But the second dream made her begin to question. Could she be seeing something that really happened? Was really happening? Was she having her Calling? No, it can’t be, she told herself.
mehryment 