Starved For Affection

The dreams came more frequently now. Often, she wasn't even sure she was dreaming; a blessing, she supposed during her more coherent moments. Sometimes she had conversations with her mother, or her sister, and at times her father, though he had been dead for twenty years or more. These were very real, very tangible conferences, and she looked forward to them more and more and the days dissolved into weeks and the weeks became nothing more than ways to mark a line of time no longer important in the greater scheme. The boundaries separating actuality and chimera became increasingly unstable as she sunk into that place where her body had no power to harm her. She did not know, or perhaps did not care to know, that these conversations with her relatives were harbingers of her imminent doom.

But, had she known, Sylvie would have rejoiced, for it meant her imprisonment was nearly over. But she had long ago ceased to care much about the semantics of her reality, for they meant little and brought only unhappiness. It was easier to drift in that liquid world where the dead appeared vigorous and people to whom she had not spoken in since childhood and who lived thousands of miles away could visit her at whim.

She suffered moments of clarity, of course. In the beginning, she had been painfully conscious of her plight. There seemed no escaping the reality, and she had slowly gone insane as the moments ticked by, broken only by the sound of her own screams and tears. Like a badly made tapestry, the fabric of her conscious slowly unraveled until there was nothing left of the woman whose hopes and dreams, fears and joys had once been woven into it. It was merely fragments of a whole, meaningless now.

At the onset of her imprisonment, Sylvie clung to hope like a drowning woman, believing with unwavering certainty that her rescue was assured, that those few with whom she shared the pieces of her life would come looking for her. But, alas, as the days passed and no one came for her except the one responsible for her predicament, Sylvie realized she was truly alone in a world filled with billions of souls, none of whom cared that she lay dying in an empty room. The knowledge stripped her of all confidence and left her broken like a reed.

"Don't you see?" he crooned softly into her ear, holding her to his massive chest against her diminishing will during one of his many nightly visits. "I am the only one who loves you. They have not come and

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