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"There are times the line between reality, dreams, and insanity becomes so thin it disappears entirely," the Rabbit Princess whispered to her sleeping friend. "It's not my fault. Time itself just gets wonky when I'm around."
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The road grew harder to see the longer Lisa drove. The moonless, starless sky, the falling snow streaming toward her in her headlights, the late hour, the tears in her eyes, all contributed to the difficulty she had seeing ahead of her.
She intended her arrival tonight at the ski resort instead of tomorrow morning to be a surprise for her boyfriend of three years, David. He had made the plans weeks ago. They would spend Saturday skiing, having a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant nearby, and spending the night in a gorgeous hotel overlooking the slopes.
She had expected, or hoped at least, to return home Sunday with a big diamond on her finger.
David went up Friday afternoon because he had been working nearby that week, but Lisa would be coming Saturday late morning.
He seemed to be less surprised than she had been, but that may have been faked on his part because of the woman hugged up on him from behind wearing only one of his dress shirts that wasn't even buttoned when they opened the door to greet her.
Apparently they were expecting room service.
Now Lisa just wanted to get home as quickly as possible and forget everything about the last three years and the plans she'd made for the rest of her life.
David hadn't even made the effort to explain, or chase her down to beg her to forgive him, but simply let her run away crying.
She even waited, crying in her car in the parking lot for ten minutes before she drove away.
She thought she had been cautious on the ice and snow covered mountain road, but maybe she hadn't paid as much attention on the long, downhill grade. She knew she had picked up speed, but still managed to successfully navigate the gentle curve with her foot off both the accelerator and brakes just as the road leveled out at the bottom of the grade, but the dark semi truck and trailer part-way through the curve surprised her and she jerked the wheel hard to the left.
She didn't need to do that. The truck had safely pulled onto the shoulder before being abandoned.
She shouldn't have done that.
Time slowed and Lisa felt the rear end of her sedan slowly swing behind her. She spun the wheel to the right, into the slide, but the tires failed to find traction.
Her head swiveled to her right to look out the rear window, her new direction of travel, and watched the guardrail glow red, reflecting her taillights.
She felt the car jerk and heard the screech of metal on metal when the car's rear quarter panel glanced off the guard rail and began to spin the opposite direction around her.
Her head quickly turned to look forward again, and the guard rail opposite the one she had most recently struck glowed white in her headlights and quickly loomed larger until it engulfed her entire field of vision.
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Lisa felt like the dream she didn't remember hadn't ended, but she knew dreams never involved pain. She felt sharp pain in her right leg and the left side of her head. She reclined, but knew it wasn't a bed beneath her.
She had no idea where she was or how she got there. The dark silence and acrid odor around her offered no hints.
She tried to raise her left hand to her aching head, but something held it down so she used her right. She felt something wet, and it looked like blood on her fingers.
"Whoa, that was a fucking rush," a woman's voice spoke beside her, so she turned her head and looked to her right.
The woman sitting up next to her, a stranger, looked weird to Lisa.
The dim light, coming from somewhere near Lisa's feet, gave everything she could see strange shadows, so that might have contributed to the strangeness of her appearance.
Her long, thick, blue-gray hair ran down her back, apparently in some kind of ponytail, and whatever she wore matched her hair in color and texture.
Her deep blue eyes seemed too large and far apart, and her nose and mouth seemed all wrong.
She had a certain, almost other-worldly attractiveness, something not quite, but almost human, but she still struck Lisa as a beautiful woman.
She leaned down and embraced Lisa, cheek to cheek.
"Don't be afraid. You're gonna be okay. I promise. You don't know it, but I'm here."
Lisa didn't even realize how cold she felt until the stranger hugged her, and she felt warmth surround her as her mind drifted back to blackness.
####
Lisa startled awake without preamble. She tried to sit up, but the people swarming around her didn't allow it.
"CT...neurology...OR...bleeding...vitals...x-ray..."
The words spoken by the crowd surrounding her supine body jumbled and mixed together to form a pile of word salad in her head.
Lisa understood where she was, but didn't know why or how she got there.
She couldn't take her eyes off the stranger at her feet, keeping pace with her gurney, walking backwards, but never pulling away and never letting her eyes waiver from Lisa's.
Both her long ponytails stood straight up from each side of her head now, and a bright white patch filled the center of each and came to a point at the top and bottom.
Lisa wondered how, and why, she did that with her hair.
She looked like she'd been crying, but forced a smile at Lisa when their eyes met.
Her nose twitched oddly before she spoke.
"I told you you'd be okay. You can see me again. Everything is fine now."
Lisa wondered, if everything is fine now, why her entire body hurt so badly and she was in a hospital.
####
"There you are, sleepyhead," a kind, female voice pierced the fog pillowing Lisa's mind.
She blinked a few times, and her vision cleared some, almost enough to barely determine the blob in front of her was a woman.
"Ugh," she groaned. "What happened?"
Her voice sounded like it came from somebody else that wasn't even in the room.
"You had a little boo boo in your car."
"Boo boo?"
"You lost control, hit a couple guard rails, flipped over the second one and rolled over a few times down a hill. You're mostly okay. Not so much your car, they say. They had to use the jaws of life.
"They say you're lucky you weren't going very fast, and you weren't at a cliff that drops straight down to the river from the highway."
Movement in the corner of the room caught Lisa's attention, so she looked there, just with her eyes. Her head seemed unwilling to move much at the moment.
"If I'm okay, why am I in the hospital?"
Her eyes were glued to the stranger, the woman she assumed she dreamed about, curled up asleep in the chair in the corner.
"You have a concussion and a pretty nasty cut on your head. You got some stitches in your head and you needed surgery on your leg. The head wound is in your hair, so the scar won't show once your hair grows back, but your leg...I'm sorry. That scar's gonna show."
"How long will I be here?"
The stranger in the chair stirred, then sat up, stretched her arms over her head, arched her back, and yawned loudly.
Lisa immediately thought her yawn wasn't very lady-like.
"You'll probably go home tomorrow sometime."
The stranger locked eyes with Lisa and smiled as her ponytails...
ears
rose and pointed at the ceiling.
She stood up and stretched again, rising to her tiptoes.
