Dreams of Snow and Cars
I wake again from the dream of snow and cars. In the dream, I am blanketed by soft white, too cold to feel the cold, but my head hurts, and there are spots of red everywhere – at the corners of my vision, on the snow, and covering my mother’s face. A mask of red, and she is unmoving, but I am crying.
At Night
When you’re a child and you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of your parents fighting, it might last a minute – or ten - but it feels like forever. You creep out of your bed to the mouth of the stairs.
Then you retreat, then creep forward again, this time bolder, down a few steps. But you run back to bed when you see a stomping figure cross the base of the stairs, bellowing and waving his arms. The sound of your mother being slapped sends a jolt through you. Should you go help her? But you are only five. What if you get hit too? What if he kills her? What if he kills you? These thoughts swim in a circle of anxiety until exhaustion steals you back to sleep. A slamming door makes you stir, but you do not come to the surface.
Walk the River
The Bus
Sometimes I wake in the night, the
feeling of hands on my long hair, gently braiding. At those times, I sit up and
think I see a young girl in the corner of my room, eyes shining, smile bright
but sad. She fades until I no longer even see a suggestion of her shape. I cry
then, even all these years later.
The Dump
I pitched a quick look over my shoulder. I was almost at the tree line and the horses were still at the lower fence. Growing up around horses, I was not normally afraid of them, but when I walked through the pasture, I always had a feeling they would run toward me, trampling me in their haste. It was the wide open that made me feel this way. They were really very huge animals.
Day 12 of the Apocalypse
Grandpa's Pet
My grandfather had a pet fly. The same fly every year. I believe his name was Bub.
My Mom told me this with a grin. As a child, she didn’t know that flies don’t live too long, and had thought he really had a pet that returned year after year. A charming thing for my grandfather to do, who was always hilarious in a very understated way. With the same grin, she told me how he used to hit her.