It appeared nothing new to Clarice but rather exasperating when she opened the wooden, cracked door to her bedroom and found a huge cardboard box, filled with toys and random junks all accumulated for this one reason she never truly processed in her mind before saying it, “I need it for Emelem.”

Emelem. What a strange, peculiar word that in her mind seem to behold a profound enigma.

Clarice didn’t think much of it when the word first popped into her mind in a voice resembling that of her cat from six years ago. It was also extremely bemusing that she could not exactly make out his name. It was almost as if a part of her memory was concealed in a misty realm where only the unknown existed.

Only with a month of companionship, he was just a cat that Clarice regarded as merely an entity, and she never seemed to acknowledge the questionable fact that she first found him surrounded by a circle of nuns praying over his moribund state.

However, when she tried to remember the details, there was just simply nothing left.

It was only six years later when Clarice realized the foolish self that was so ignorant and careless of the obvious clues presented in front of her. Her inordinate pride forced her focus away from her surroundings and kept her head foolishly high, reluctant to turn around. She was like a clown.

“Sis! What have you been doing when I was gone?” A voice echoed and magnified as the girl made her way to Clarice, walking step after step on the red wooden floor that she thought very low of because it seemed to her just another dross that depicted her sis’s low quality of life.

And that was also exactly why the two sisters were distant and had most of the time, a plastic relationship.

Clarice bit down on her lips till they reddened and turned around just about the instant her sister stopped moving toward her. Facing her sister who was wearing a huge, fake smile as if overcoming with excruciating happiness, Clarice returned a half-genuine, half-phony smile that didn’t make its way to her eyes.

“Hey, Charlotte.”

“Awww, Clare why so cooold~” Charlotte’s honey voice was just as cloying and unpleasant to the ears as the greenfly bug rain from one of Clarice’s bizarre dreams.

These bizarre dreams. Dreams that she had been having ever since…she couldn’t remember. There were so many frenetic essences creating layers and layers of illusions: bugs, countless bugs, witches, a circle of laughing witches, rains, flooding rains, bloody rains, rains filled with skins and human fleshes. It was just like the rest of the details, the rest of the stories, the rest of her memories, and who knew what else the rest they were? She couldn’t remember, and that was all there to it. In other words, you could say, she didn’t care. She didn’t want to remember and in a way that if she didn’t, if she refused, then nothing will happen.

Everything would still be normal.

Clarice doesn’t think about things too deeply. You see, she had this conviction that things will naturally bend itself at the end. The boat will eventually turn itself straight at the end of a bridge. She thought that things will eventually bend themselves in the right direction. Everything will turn out okay, if not, well, she never wanted to go in that direction.

“Just say what you want. You know how we are. I know you didn't come here to say HI."

"Oh. I did come here to say Hi."

"HI"

"..."

"..."

"Whatever, I don't know what you are talking about."

“You do. You can’t deny what has happened.”

“Who said that I can’t? You? You are just some unknown insect barely even living in this impoverished house that you probably got from federal funds? Whatever the Jojo that is! I know you still hate me for what I did but come on! You know clearly what was coming! I am better than you in so much sense.”

“Stop. I have no more words for you. You already said your HI. What do you want?”

As the sound of Clarice’s words’ gradual decrease of volume, signifying her weakness and pain from evoking memories, Charlotte couldn’t help but suppress the desire to giggle uncontrollably coming from just thinking about the things she was going to say. She couldn’t wait to see Clarice’s expressions then.

“Well yeah, I didn't really come here to say HI. I came here to tell you about something so important that I even came here to this little tragic place. Wanna take a guess?”

Clarice stared in utter silence at her younger sister’s especially wicked face at that moment, waiting for her words while forcing down a gut feeling of wrongness. A feeling that she would never be the same anymore.

“I officially invite you to a wedding of Mr. Sy and Mrs. Sy. Me and Sy. A perfect about-to-be newlywed”

Sy? Her ex-fiance? The man who said he was going to love her and only her for all his life? Who left her in a forsaken house when he found someone else, and that someone being her own baby sister?

Overcame with physical and emotional torment at the sound of his name and the news that she always predicted but never thought how painful it would be, Clarice blacked out.

She blacked out and woke up to somewhere where perhaps she’ll never return from.