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Description
I had a bad dream after that. It was familiar, the place where all experiences like this sent me. School would have put me naked in a meadow of glass that cut me wherever I touched it. Usually I tried to stand still there, letting my weight press the shards into my feet. If the dream wasn’t long, sometimes I could stand it. If I screamed, the noise would echo, cutting at my ears in a different way.

Foster fathers and brothers put me in a close tunnel with sticky walls. I couldn’t see, I could barely move. Slime dripped from the ceiling a few inches above my head into my hair. It smelled like nothing else smelled. Dream was that way; It didn’t depend on the ingredients of your surroundings to put something in your senses.

Sometimes I just curled up here and waited to wake up, but that was dangerous. They were close by always, listening. The caves and the glass meadow weren’t hiding places. They knew the places of my arrivals and I couldn’t depend on a dream’s brevity to save me. Long dreams happened, especially when my presence had something to do with foster fathers.

So I dug my fingers in hard to the slipperiness, until my nails bit through and I felt rock beneath the layer of slime. Anchoring myself this way, I dragged my body forward, occasionally stopping when I reached a bend or dead end, keeping my eyes closed since there was no light by which to see, anyway. Keeping my eyes closed helped a little, anyway. I could picture something other than lightlessness.

Sarah’s words filled my head, as though she’d sent them to me. Because she’d sent them to me.

Buoyed, I wiped a gob of slick filth off of my mouth and hauled onward.

The first time I’d been put here I’d almost died. It was because of Harriet’s warning that I managed to stay alive. I could still picture her face when she told me – calmly - what men sometimes did to girls like us; when she told me, jaw set, that it wouldn’t kill you. That after a while you’d stop wanting to die.

Even knowing something about it, even hearing it from someone I trusted as much as Harriet, it was still hard. It was hard because I was twelve and because just at the end of it dream tore me away and put me in a filthy hole to suffocate.

I panicked. I threw myself against the walls and screamed, choking on slime, my eyes burning and blind. And then I heard them, and I realized Harriet was right. I didn’t want to die. So I’d found my way out, somehow, hearing them what seemed like inches away from me. It didn’t occur to me then to give up, but I wonder now why I didn’t just let them take me. I’m not sure what about real or dream makes me want to live.

They are all about sound. You can’t cry or speak or, especially, scream while you’re in bad dream, or they come quickly.

I knew I’d reached the surface because I felt the press of light on my closed eyes. I wiped the last of the stickiness onto my gray t-shirt and opened them. The slimy tunnels formed a mound like an anthill, and I sat on the top of it, its porous hulk dry and claylike. The gray sun sat in the gray sky. The meadow spread to one side of the mound, gleaming like a sea of knives’ edges, and the forest rose in the other.

They hadn’t followed me into the forest yet.

I thought about waiting, counting on a short dream. But that was risky, so instead I crawled down off the mound and listened to the glass crunch under the soles of my shoes. They were pink high-tops with light up soles; one of my few cherished Christmas presents: exactly what I’d asked for when I was ten years old. They’d been my proof of the existence of Santa Claus.

The forest was dark, like all the places in bad dream, but otherwise I wondered why it was there. I understood the meadow and the mound: places designed to trap me, to cajole panic and sound that would lure them. But the forest was just black sandy soil and the tall trees, all of a height with one another and spaced at perfect intervals, an endless grid of long shadows.

Except this time.

There was a row of them, holding their tails in one forepaw, balancing on the knuckles of the other. They appeared in the number of one pack: five. Two were panting, as though they’d just run. The other three were still, triangular heads cocked, slitted lavender eyes the only color in the grayscale landscape.

I hadn’t been here long enough to be tracked by scent. I hadn’t made a sound. I was in the forest. And they were here, anyway. None of the few rules I’d learned, in ten years of bad dream, were obeyed by these circumstances.

I didn’t move. In a way I was captured by my study of them. I knew what they looked like mostly from glimpses over my shoulder. I’d never gazed into their eyes or watched the rise and fall of their hunched shoulders with elevated breath.

“Duck!” shouted someone, so I ducked. As my knees hit the sand, I felt a wave of energy pass over my head, making my hair stand on end. It collided with the row and they flew backward like paper bags in a strong wind. Four sailed between the trees and out of sight, but one slammed into the trunk of a tree by chance. The air sang with its cry, and then the body fell in a still heap, lifting a cloud of sand around it like dust.

When I could move, I stood slowly to face the possessor of the voice. It was a boy that looked the age I looked. He had a horribly crooked nose and nothing else that made an impression.

“What did you do?” I’d never spoken in bad dream except to scream or cry, which led me to another question. “Why are you here?” No one had ever been in bad dream with me. Ever. “Who are you?”

He only answered the last question. “I’m Joe,” he said. And I woke up.

Description
I had a bad dream after that. It was familiar, the place where all experiences like this sent me. School would have put me naked in a meadow of glass that cut me wherever I touched it. Usually I tried to stand still there, letting my weight press the shards into my feet. If the dream wasn’t long, sometimes I could stand it. If I screamed, the noise would echo, cutting at my ears in a different way.

Foster fathers and brothers put me in a close tunnel with sticky walls. I couldn’t see, I could barely move. Slime dripped from the ceiling a few inches above my head into my hair. It smelled like nothing else smelled. Dream was that way; It didn’t depend on the ingredients of your surroundings to put something in your senses.

Sometimes I just curled up here and waited to wake up, but that was dangerous. They were close by always, listening. The caves and the glass meadow weren’t hiding places. They knew the places of my arrivals and I couldn’t depend on a dream’s brevity to save me. Long dreams happened, especially when my presence had something to do with foster fathers.

So I dug my fingers in hard to the slipperiness, until my nails bit through and I felt rock beneath the layer of slime. Anchoring myself this way, I dragged my body forward, occasionally stopping when I reached a bend or dead end, keeping my eyes closed since there was no light by which to see, anyway. Keeping my eyes closed helped a little, anyway. I could picture something other than lightlessness.

Sarah’s words filled my head, as though she’d sent them to me. Because she’d sent them to me.

Buoyed, I wiped a gob of slick filth off of my mouth and hauled onward.

The first time I’d been put here I’d almost died. It was because of Harriet’s warning that I managed to stay alive. I could still picture her face when she told me – calmly - what men sometimes did to girls like us; when she told me, jaw set, that it wouldn’t kill you. That after a while you’d stop wanting to die.

Even knowing something about it, even hearing it from someone I trusted as much as Harriet, it was still hard. It was hard because I was twelve and because just at the end of it dream tore me away and put me in a filthy hole to suffocate.

I panicked. I threw myself against the walls and screamed, choking on slime, my eyes burning and blind. And then I heard them, and I realized Harriet was right. I didn’t want to die. So I’d found my way out, somehow, hearing them what seemed like inches away from me. It didn’t occur to me then to give up, but I wonder now why I didn’t just let them take me. I’m not sure what about real or dream makes me want to live.

They are all about sound. You can’t cry or speak or, especially, scream while you’re in bad dream, or they come quickly.

I knew I’d reached the surface because I felt the press of light on my closed eyes. I wiped the last of the stickiness onto my gray t-shirt and opened them. The slimy tunnels formed a mound like an anthill, and I sat on the top of it, its porous hulk dry and claylike. The gray sun sat in the gray sky. The meadow spread to one side of the mound, gleaming like a sea of knives’ edges, and the forest rose in the other.

They hadn’t followed me into the forest yet.

I thought about waiting, counting on a short dream. But that was risky, so instead I crawled down off the mound and listened to the glass crunch under the soles of my shoes. They were pink high-tops with light up soles; one of my few cherished Christmas presents: exactly what I’d asked for when I was ten years old. They’d been my proof of the existence of Santa Claus.

The forest was dark, like all the places in bad dream, but otherwise I wondered why it was there. I understood the meadow and the mound: places designed to trap me, to cajole panic and sound that would lure them. But the forest was just black sandy soil and the tall trees, all of a height with one another and spaced at perfect intervals, an endless grid of long shadows.

Except this time.

There was a row of them, holding their tails in one forepaw, balancing on the knuckles of the other. They appeared in the number of one pack: five. Two were panting, as though they’d just run. The other three were still, triangular heads cocked, slitted lavender eyes the only color in the grayscale landscape.

I hadn’t been here long enough to be tracked by scent. I hadn’t made a sound. I was in the forest. And they were here, anyway. None of the few rules I’d learned, in ten years of bad dream, were obeyed by these circumstances.

I didn’t move. In a way I was captured by my study of them. I knew what they looked like mostly from glimpses over my shoulder. I’d never gazed into their eyes or watched the rise and fall of their hunched shoulders with elevated breath.

“Duck!” shouted someone, so I ducked. As my knees hit the sand, I felt a wave of energy pass over my head, making my hair stand on end. It collided with the row and they flew backward like paper bags in a strong wind. Four sailed between the trees and out of sight, but one slammed into the trunk of a tree by chance. The air sang with its cry, and then the body fell in a still heap, lifting a cloud of sand around it like dust.

When I could move, I stood slowly to face the possessor of the voice. It was a boy that looked the age I looked. He had a horribly crooked nose and nothing else that made an impression.

“What did you do?” I’d never spoken in bad dream except to scream or cry, which led me to another question. “Why are you here?” No one had ever been in bad dream with me. Ever. “Who are you?”

He only answered the last question. “I’m Joe,” he said. And I woke up.