The first picture shows a boy skating downhill, his features obscured by the darkness of his baseball cap. A casual observation would bring the viewer to interpret an attitude of defiance and rebellion. Anger only comes to mind when you look at the caption:

Death.

The caption itself is of more interest then the drawing. Not because of any stylised way it has been produced but because of the way the pencil had been pressed so hard into the paper that the place where the ‘h’ ought to have been there is an h shaped hole. The drawing itself is beautiful, intensely real, almost as if the boy in the picture has been frozen and pasted onto the page. No, pinned down with pencil tips, she thought as she strokes the caption, feeling the grooves that her mundane pencil has produced.

The second picture shows the boy with his back to the viewer. Shoulders slumped, head bowed he seems the picture of defeat. Closer observation shows a slight rigidity in his back that suggests he is defending himself from something or someone.

She has written another caption just as forcefully beneath this rendering:

Death’s Submissive.

She smiles slowly. The submissive is always in charge. She forgot who told her that but she knows it’s true. As true as the dreams she has from time to time. The ones she has to fight to remember. Part sketchbook, part journal, part dream book, the thick folder holds together scraps of paper torn from notepads, the corners of text books, expensive note paper, art block and other random things like postcards.

Despite the chaotic look of the contents she has everything organised in her own way. Sticking her hand inside the folder her fingers dance expertly past scraps of tissue that have a somewhat unreadable, tear stained piece of tissue that contains an emotional letter to an ex-boyfriend, over cheap scented paper someone cajoled her into buying for charity that has a whole series of comics painstakingly drawn onto them to finally rest on the most recent sacrifice from her Malay grammar book. The white paper with horizontal blue lines, the pink margin still sticking out from the book on her desk, standard issue in all government schools, held her latest dream.

She never wrote anything down, in words anyway. Words were treacherous things that were used against you, they were taken so seriously. Pictures on the other hand were often dismissed as imagination and mere fantasy. She could make death threats and no one would really take her all that seriously, not as seriously as they might if she had written the threat down in words.

Now she studied the images before her. The commentary to the sequence of pictures unfolded in her head in more pictures, as her own little movie played in her head, she remembered with even greater clarity what she had dreamed.

The very first thing of course was the image of the boy skating into endless dark. She remembered even while dreaming the eerie sensation that enveloped her as she recognised him. She had seen him only the day before at church and then there he was in her dreams.

With fascination she watched as an image of him, still skating, replaced the previous one only this time he was smoking with his face contorted in a painful rage. She remembered only too clearly the sinking feeling she had felt as she watched him meet boys that he knew, that they both knew, and start to fight with them. The big difference in size, his body being almost childlike next to their almost adult ones, was ominously apparent.

Her dream self had gone forwards to him, as he lay almost beaten to death. She had picked him up, with little effort, and carried him away. And lastly the sight of him rolling away from her, eyes closed in sleep or final rest she wasn’t sure yet, on his skateboard, an awkward way to go when one was on one’s belly, arms grating on asphalt.

Her minds projector flickered into blackness and she stared at the last picture. It was of herself carrying a figure, her back to the reader, walking towards a light of some kind. She didn’t remember any illumination in her dream but she had drawn unconsciously. Perhaps an effort to make the grim pictures a little lighter. There really wasn’t anything you could do to make this dream sugarplum sweet.

We all are. That’s what she had told him when he had said that he was dying. She had known that her dream was true, had never doubted it for an instance. When she had said that to him she hadn’t meant to make him feel worse it was only her way of trying to say that he was not alone in his dying. As usual words had once again disappointed her when trying her very best to get her point across. What else did you tell a dying boy-man she agonised?

What else? What else? She realised after a few seconds of feeling the question bounce around her head like a demented ping pong she had unwittingly sketched a cartoon phone. Of course she could call him, the thought formed slowly as she made the telephone cord curlier.

Now there was only the slightly impossible task of locating the phone directory that the camp facilitators had painstakingly made for everyone else, except her, who wanted to keep in touch at the last Jesus freak camp that she had been forced to go to. Her mind flitting to possible places to look, the newspaper pile for recycling, her wastepaper basket, her grandmothers bible (loaned to her for camp now in a nursing home), a rain soaked duffel bag; it was only slightly impossible.