The Sugar Room

The first time I dreamed of Rose, I didn’t think it mattered.

I’m not the kind of person who reads into dreams. I’m practical, tired, the sort of man who forgets to eat and forgets to water plants until they die quietly. I don’t believe in signs. I believe in patterns, and at the time, there wasn’t one yet.I was sitting in a chair.

That was the first thing that struck me, not where I was, but how neatly I was positioned.

My back was straight, my hands folded in my lap, feet flat on the floor. I hadn’t sat down. I had been placed.

The room looked perfect in the way a catalog looks perfect. A dining space washed in soft pastel light, frozen in a permanent late afternoon. The walls were a gentle pink-beige, the kind meant to feel warm and comforting. A vase of flowers sat on a sideboard, every petal flawless.

The air smelled like sugar and something faintly floral.

In front of me was a small round table, polished to a mirror shine.

On it sat a white plate. On the plate was a cookie.

Across the table stood Rose.

He looked like he belonged there in the way nothing else ever really does. Pink hair, neatly styled, not a strand out of place. A soft apron tied around his waist, dusted with flour like he’d been baking for hours.

His posture was relaxed, practiced… someone who had learned exactly how to take up space without threatening anyone.

His face was gentle. Almost kind.But his eyes were wrong. Not glassy, not glowing… just still. They didn’t dart or soften. They rested on me with a focus that felt invasive, like hands pressing flat against my chest.

“You should eat,” he said.

His voice wasn’t soothing. It wasn’t cruel either. It was blunt, factual, like he was stating the next step in a recipe.

I looked down at the cookie. A sugar cookie, iced pink, a small rose piped into the center with meticulous care. Too perfect. Too deliberate. The smell was overpowering up close, sweet enough to make my teeth ache.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

Rose’s smile didn’t fade, but it tightened, just slightly, like a muscle resisting a cramp.

“That’s alright,” he replied. “You’ll be hungry later.”

I woke up with my jaw clenched and the taste of sugar stuck to the back of my tongue.

The dream came back the next night.

Identical chair. Identical table. Identical light that didn’t cast shadows the way it should. No windows, no doors… just the suggestion of a room, carefully arranged to imply safety.

This time, the cookie was different.

Still round, still iced, but cracked down the center. The icing was uneven, smeared in places, like someone had rushed.

Rose noticed me staring.

“I fixed it,” he said. “It’s still good.”

I studied him more closely then. The flour on his apron never shifted. His hair didn’t move, not even when he tilted his head. He smelled sweet, but underneath it was something metallic, something old.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Somewhere safe,” he answered immediately.

The word felt rehearsed.

I laughed, short and nervous. The sound didn’t carry. It died too quickly, like the room swallowed it whole.Rose didn’t react.

“You’re wasting time,” he said. “Eat.”

I pushed my chair back.

The scrape of wood against the floor was loud, wrong, echoing too sharply. The moment my foot touched the ground, the room blurred and folded in on itself.

I woke up gasping.

After that, it became routine.

Every night, I have the same dream. Every night, Rose waits. The cookie changed each time: Chocolate-dipped, soft and pale, iced so thick it sagged under its own weight. Once, it was shaped wrong, lopsided, like it had been made by hands that were tired or angry.

Rose spoke less as the nights went on.

His patience wore thin in quiet ways. Shorter sentences. Tighter posture. His smile slowly stopped reaching his eyes.

“You’ll starve,” he told me one night.

I asked him what would happen if I didn’t eat.He stared at me for a long time, his gaze heavy, assessing. When he finally spoke, his voice was colder.

“Everyone eats eventually.”

The room started to change once I started paying attention.

From the chair, everything looked perfect. But when I stood and walked closer to the walls, the illusion cracked. The pastel paint wasn’t smooth… it was peeling in thin strips, curling away to reveal something dark and swollen beneath. The flowers on the sideboard were stiff, their stems brittle, their scent cloying up close.

The floorboards were scratched.

Not randomly. Parallel lines. Like fingernails.

When I reached out to touch the wall, my fingers burned.

I woke up instantly, heart racing, my skin tingling as if shocked.

The next night, Rose was already standing when I arrived.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

“…Do what?”

“Look.”

The cookie on the plate was gray and crumbly, like ash pressed into a familiar shape.

“I just want to understand,” I told him.

Rose leaned forward, palms flat on the table. Up close, I could see the cracks in his composure… the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers dug into the wood.

“There is nothing to understand,” he said. “There is eating. Or there is hunger.”

People started dying.

Heart failure in their sleep. Choking. Internal injuries with no external cause. The articles mentioned nightmares. Vivid dreams. Waking up starving.

I stopped sleeping.

It didn’t matter.

Rose found me anyway.

This time Rose wasn’t there.

I searched.

The oven was behind the counter.

The kitchen smelled wrong up close. Sweetness layered thick enough to hide rot. When I opened the oven door, heat washed over my face, dry and suffocating.

Inside were trays stacked high.

Bones ground down fine as flour. Teeth mixed into dough. Jewelry melted into the metal. Something pink and fibrous caught in the grate that I realized, too late, had once been part of someone’s mouth.

“You weren’t invited back there.”

Rose stood behind me, closer than he’d ever been. His apron was stained now. The flour on his hands had darkened into something sticky and red.

“They were hungry,” he said calmly. “I helped.”

I woke up choking, my stomach cramping like it had been hollowed out.

The next cookie was still warm.

It bled when I touched it.

“You see now,” Rose said. “Everything here is real.”

I asked him what would happen if I never ate.

For the first time, his voice sharpened with real anger.

“You don’t get to refuse forever,” he snapped. “You’re wasting what I give you.”

The final dream was smaller.

The room felt compressed, the walls cracked open, pastel skins hanging in strips to reveal the rot beneath. The table was gouged with nail marks. The air was thick, heavy.

On the plate sat a heart.

Human. Whole. Still beating.

I stood up slowly, backing away.

Rose crossed the room in seconds, grabbing my jaw with hands far stronger than they looked. His composure was gone now, replaced with raw irritation.

“You should have eaten when you had the chance,” he said.

He forced my mouth open.

The heart was hot and alive against my tongue, beating once—twice—before he shoved it down my throat, his hand clamped over my mouth as I gagged and thrashed.

“Don’t waste it,” he hissed. “I made this for you.”

I woke up screaming.

The pain didn’t fade.

My chest burned, sharp and tearing, like something inside me had finally given up. I collapsed on the floor, gasping, clawing at my shirt.

The last thing I felt was my heart rupturing under the strain.

They said I died in my sleep.

That night, somewhere warm and perfect and sweet-smelling, Rose set the table again.

He smoothed his apron, fixed his hair, and placed a fresh cookie on the plate.

He waited.

Someone would be hungry soon.

Credit: EternalSleep

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