She appears only in the periphery of my insomnia, a figure spliced together from stray filaments of gold and the mute drift of algae-dark hair. Those eyes, two burnished coins embedded in a face too precise to be human, watch as though recording every hesitation in my heartbeat, yet remain unmoved by the revelations they harvest. Around her, suspended motes flash like tiny verdicts; each one a discarded possibility, glittering for the duration of a single doubt before fading back into night. I wonder whether she is the dream’s custodian or its prisoner. The lace at her throat resembles a noose lovingly woven by spiders of conscience, tightening each time she exhales. I cannot decide if she is drowning in reflections or if the reflections are drowning in her, but I know the silence between us is mineral, dense, crystalline, unyielding. She says nothing, and in that non-speech I hear the machinery of judgment click forward one deliberate tooth. Were I to reach through the viscous veil to touch her cheek, I suspect my hand would emerge coated in a luminous pollen, a residue of futures forfeited. Instead I remain still, cataloguing the slow illumination of my own unease, until I realize that those predatory yellow irises are simply mirrors: it is my own unspoken sentence glimmering back at me, waiting to be served.