Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
I don’t dream.
I mean, I do dream, everybody dreams, or else we’d all go slowly mad.
What I meant to say is that my dreams aren’t dreams, their memories. Events pulled from my subconscious and dressed in modern-day clothes. Usually, they tended to be past situations that mirrored current conflicts in my life, and I thought they were meant to provide a solution in a George Santayana Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, sort of way. Alas and alack, this was not the case because I always made the same mistakes, no matter which fork in the road I took.
And the memory-dreams never brought the comfort of nostalgia with them, as they were never good memories, or they might start off pleasant, but there was always something there to sour the experience. Had I really never experienced true happiness in my life? If I described how my memory dreams played out each night, people might have gotten the impression that I was born in a Dickensian novel. “The Tale of Two Pities,” or some such.
And I was certain there was a level of fiction that mixed with real-life moments, the dream and waking world seemed to derive pleasure from swapping details like so many trading cards, which caused me to doubt the authenticity of my remembrance of things.
Worse were the insignificant moments that I had largely forgotten about, which were somehow amplified in my dreams, only to be transformed into real-life triggers. Triggers noticeable enough that my best friend, Shelly, began asking, “What happened to you?” which I took as, What the hell did you do to yourself that made you turn into such a freak?
Normally, I took a moment to ponder a believable and sympathetic lie to tell, but my latest dream shook me to the core, and I had to tell somebody before my mind exploded.
“Shell, you’re not going to believe me,” I started.
“Only one way to find out, Gingerbread. Tell me and we’ll see where it goes from there,” Shelly offered a reassuring smile. Gingerbread was a nickname I picked up as a little girl because of my skin tone, freckles—yes, brown skin can have freckles as well—and shock of red hair—we can also be redheads. I punched as many faces as it took in primary school to put an end to it, but it remained a term of endearment between Shell and me, and now that I was older, I had to admit, it kind of grew on me.
I brought Shelly up to speed on my dreaming situation, and to my surprise, she was not only interested but also concerned for me. She was a better friend than I realized and I should have done this years ago.
“Last night,” I said. “I dreamt that everything was the same as it is now but instead of going to community college, I took a gap year. It was the summer, and I struggled into my clothes, splashed water on my face, and gulped down a scalding cup of tea. Flinging open the door to the garden, I felt a breeze wash over my face. It had rained overnight and the air was damp with expectation.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Shelly said.
“Then I looked down at my belly…and I was pregnant.”
“You what?”
“Not only that, but the pregnancy had driven me mad, alienated me from my husband…”
“You were married? At 18?”
“Yeah, I know, right?” I said. “And just like in one of those Lifetime movies, my world tilted on its axis threatening to pitch me off. Then I gave birth. And this tiny person, who was partially made of me that would one day grow independent of me, somehow held the universe together.”
“Well, that’s a happy ending, I suppose,” Shelly said.
“But that’s not the weird bit,” I said, taking a deep breath before continuing. “I woke up with that same baby lying in bed beside me.”
“Wait a minute now, you woke up with a baby?”
“Yeah, a newborn, by the looks of it.”
“Whose baby is it?”
“Mine, I suppose. It’s the spitting image of pictures of me as a baby.”
“But you didn’t have a baby before you went to sleep?”
“No, I wasn’t even pregnant.”
“Of course not because you being pregnant is something I definitely would have noticed,” Shelly said, trying to work it out in her head. “But, but, um…so where’s the baby now?”
“At home, with my husband, naturally. What kind of mother do you take me for?” I snapped. My response was so reflexive that I only registered the words after I had spoken them. Off Shelly’s shocked expression, I said, “I’m sorry, Shell, I don’t know where that came from.”
“Seemed like a pretty motherly response to me.”
“It’s like my mind and emotions are running on automatic and I’m suddenly filled with all these instincts I never had before. I know this sounds crazy, but could this be an immaculate conception?”
“Not my field of expertise, sweetie, but I’m pretty sure dream pregnancies and instant husbands aren’t part of that package deal,” Shelly said. “And no offense but you’re hardly a virgin.”
“I know you’re not slut shaming me.”
“Why would I and how could I? I’m certainly not virginal, myself. Hell, do we even know any virgins?”
“Eric Petty.”
“Yeah, okay, but who would sleep with that incel weirdo? The internet was invented for simps like him to five knuckle shuffle over VTuber anime waifus,” said Shelly. “But back to the point at hand. Can I ask you a few questions so I can better wrap my head around this mystery of yours?”
“By all means.”
“What’s your baby’s name?”
My mouth opened…and remained that way. I was coming up blank. What sort of mother couldn’t remember their own child’s name?
“Okay, maybe that’s a toughie,” Shelly said. “Let’s try this husband of yours. Who is he? If he’s someone you know, the odds are I know him, too, because we know all the same people.”
My husband’s face was on the tip of my tongue. His name, however, was not. The frustration of not being able to recall even the simplest details about my family triggered a painful electrical storm of anxiety in my brain that oscillated between intense sorrow and frozen panic. There was a hole in the bucket of my sanity that I was unable to plug.
“Shell, I know how this looks but I swear I’m not crazy!” Never a convincing statement when yelled at the top of one’s lungs. Neither was, “You have to believe me!”
My sudden outburst should have triggered apprehension in Shelly but she remained calm and said, “Oh, I believe you, Gingerbread.” Then I realized she was no longer looking at my face. Her eyes were instead fixated on my chest.
“You’re leaking,” she said with a slight point of her chin.
And sure enough, the circumferences of two damp patches were expanding on my blouse.
Autumn had been a lucid dreamer long before she knew there was a term for it so she wasn’t afraid when she was being chased by a nasty piece of horrifying nightmare but, as she was about to wake herself up, she slipped on an icy patch of sueños and fell headlong into the underdream, the sleep realm in which she possessed no control.
Despite the fact she called it an early night and how utterly exhausted Mayra was when she slipped between the sheets, sleep simply would not come. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the digital display of her pregnancy test reading:
PREGNANT
It would have been called fitful if she actually managed to fall asleep even for an instant, instead she tossed and turned, trying to force her mind to relax, dreading the effects of a sleepless night on her ability to get through the work day tomorrow, or later today if she was being accurate. Mayra eventually realized she was achieving little more than gnawing away at her sanity, so she closed her eyes, sighed heavily and when she opened them, she found herself in a dream.
One, two, three, shoot! Scissors. One, two, three, shoot! Paper. Mayra’s right hand, balled in a fist, pumped at subliminal speed, slamming into the flattened palm of her left as she shot rock, paper, scissors in a seemingly random order that somehow anticipated her opponents’ throws and eliminated them one by one. That was how she knew this was a dream because all her life she had been absolutely shit at playing roshambo.
She was at a public pool, one she knew very well. It was located in the heart of Claremont Park in The Bronx, a mere fifteen or so long blocks from her childhood home. Her nose was filled with the scent of chlorine which was how everyone knew when the pool had officially opened for the summer because the smell burned nostril hairs and stung eyes from a city block away.
Mayra wore her first ever and favorite floral two-piece swimsuit, the one her mother let her choose by herself which fit perfectly when she was eleven years old but not so much now that she was a full grown, fully developed woman. It still served its purpose by covering up the bits that needed to be covered but she was showing off way more skin that she was comfortable with which made her self-conscious. A quick glance around the pool confirmed that no one was staring at her so her anxiety eased slightly.
It was summer recess and most of Mayra’s friends were here, both from school and her neighborhood. She was an adult but her friends were children which wasn’t bizarre seeing as that was how she remembered them, all except for Bethany, also an adult, who was the only person she managed to stay in touch with throughout the years. Incidentally, Bethany was also wearing a two-piece swim suit and hers fit perfectly which she found unfair to say the least.
Mayra had been a lucid dreamer from the time she remembered her first nightmare and certainly before she knew the ability had a name. And she was quite familiar with this particular dream because she had it many times before. The pool was some sort of anchor point for her, probably because it represented some of the happiest times of her life, when the summer was the best time of the year because it was fresh with the promise of childhood freedom and full of adventurous possibilities.
They were gearing up to play Sharks and Minnows and as Mayra demolished the competition during the selection process, she was the shark. Kicking off her rainbow flip flops, she dove into the water and took a position in the center of the shallow end while her minnow friends formed a line along the lip of one side of the pool.
“Fishies, fishies, cross my ocean!” Mayra challenged.
The minnows jumped into the water, some diving straight in, some cannonballing, and Bethany, who wanted to make the biggest splash, took a running start, jumped high in the air and pulled one leg to her chest, the other one sticking down toward the water as she bent back at a 35-degree angle. The minnows started swimming to the opposite end, giving the shark as wide a berth as they could in the crowded public pool. Mayra remained still until the first minnow was about to swim past.
“Shark attack!” Mayra yelled and began swimming at a frantic pace. The school of minnows shrieked, laughed and paddled as fast as they could trying to reach the other end of the pool, the safe base, without getting tagged. But the shark knew which minnow she was after, the one who lagged behind all the rest and Mayra caught up with Bethany easily but didn’t tag her immediately. The shark swam past her best friend and placed herself directly in the minnow’s path.
The minnow crashed into the shark and before she could back away Mayra lifted an index finger out of the water and booped Bethany’s nose, smiling, “Tag. Guess who’s shark chow?”
“That’s so unfair,” Bethany slapped the surface of the water. “You always pick on me cause I’m the slowest!”
“I pick you because you always do that stupid can opener dive to try and splash-blind me. Don’t hate me just cause I’m a water baby.”
“Oh yeah? Well, have some water, baby!” Bethany’s hands flew to the top of Mayra’s head and dunked her underwater.
Oh, am I going to make her pay, Mayra thought as she play-struggled beneath Bethany’s hands but wasn’t worried. Luckily, she managed to hold her breath in time and the water was shallow, that is, it was shallow until the pool bottom dropped away quickly and water began rushing past her and she realized she was plunging straight down like an anchor.
And then the water wasn’t water. It was more like mud. Mud that stopped her descent and left her floating for a moment before propelling her back up the way she came but when she resurfaced, she was no longer in the park pool. It was suddenly twilight but not eigengrau, the dark grey color seen by the eyes in perfect darkness, this was an inky darkness so pitch she couldn’t tell where mud-water met sky or whether she was facing a swimming pool edge, a shore or some other land mass or simply more water. She was completely adrift, disoriented and had no means of navigation, not even the faint light of night stars. Her world was now liquid and gas black in every direction. A strange and illogical thought hit her, Was I in the deep end of the pool? followed by, How long was I underwater?
“Okay, Bethy, joke’s over!” Mayra’s head was on a swivel for a sign of somebody, anybody else in the water but there was nothing. “Bethany, this isn’t funny!”
“Polo,” a voice called out but she couldn’t tell if it was Bethany or one of her other friends because it was so distant.
“Bethy? Is that you?”
“Polo,” the voice said again still far away but Mayra knew the direction it came from this time.
“Marco!” Mayra shouted and when she heard Polo confirm the location, she began swimming toward it. She paced herself because she had no idea how far out she was or how long she needed to keep up her strength. She occasionally called out “Marco” and listened for the “Polo” reply to make sure she was swimming in a straight line in the dark.
Then her swimming became labored, something was pulling her in the opposite direction. She was caught in a rip current! She forced herself not to panic because it took a clear head to escape. She knew, despite the sensation, that the rip current wouldn’t drag her underwater, it would only pull her straight out to sea. She was a decent swimmer so she wasn’t in immediate danger of drowning unless she exhausted herself by trying to fight the current that was stronger than she was. Normally, she would have either swum in the direction of the nearest breaking waves, which marked the current’s edge, or parallel to the shore to escape the current, but as she couldn’t see the shoreline in all the blackness, Mayra swam perpendicular to the current and prayed for the best. With any luck, the current she was in was an average one, less than thirty feet wide, and not a larger one that could have reached up to two hundred feet.
After a while she began getting tired so she floated on her back to conserve energy. This was usually when she would have woken herself up, during a lull in events, but this time it wasn’t working. Mayra remained inside the dream, staying afloat and attempting to relax until she drifted past the breaking waves. She felt the rip current becoming weaker. When she felt confident that she was ready to give it another try, she rolled over in order to begin swimming diagonally away from the current. Her face was momentarily beneath the water’s surface as she turned over but when it emerged she saw that it was no longer dark. The sky was unusually clear and the deepest blue she had ever seen in my life. The water was no longer dark, in fact, it wasn’t blue or green or clear or any color she had ever seen water be. It was a pearlescent white whose texture was liquid silk soft against her skin. Off in the distance she could see what looked like a shoreline but she couldn’t be sure as it reflected an intense white light even though there was no sun in the sky.
“Marco!” she called out and waited for a Polo that never came, so Mayra swam toward the shore hoping it wasn’t some sort of water mirage. Turned out it wasn’t. The water began getting shallower and when it was chest-deep, she planted her feet and walked to shore. The ground beneath her feet wasn’t soil, sand, gravel, pebbles, cobbles, rock, or shells, it was soft, almost as if she was walking on air—no, not quite that—like the fluffiest cotton as to make her feel nearly weightless. Just then, the silliest thought crossed her mind, The reason there are no clouds in the sky is because I’m standing on top of them.
Suddenly, with what should have been a start, Mayra realized she wasn’t alone on the shore. There was someone else standing directly behind her. Normally, she would have recoiled but she somehow sensed she wasn’t in any danger. She turned face to face with a being bright enough to cut the eye. Their face was in a constant state of flux, shifting from the familiar faces of people whose names she couldn’t recall, to images of other things that existed beyond her understanding and therefore defied description. From their body (their because the being standing before her was neither male nor female so she automatic used the nonconforming gender pronouns, they, their and them) which was pure light, a series of wings protruded at odd angles. She counted at least thirty before giving up but there could easily have been a hundred or more. The wings were emerald green, covered with saffron hairs, and appeared to be liquid by the way they reflected the light and by the faint brush strokes they made in the air as they gently flapped. On each wing were different faces of various hues and genders with unblinking eyes full of intelligence and understanding that spoke innumerous languages, none of which she understood but found beautiful nonetheless. She could have stood there motionless for the rest of her life, staring at the marvel she knew to be an angel, enveloped in wave after wave of peacefulness and contentment and acceptance and unconditional love.
Without warning, Mayra was slammed in the back by some sort of wave of vibration that knocked her off her feet and pressed her into the soft ground as if it had its own physical weight. She thought it might have been an explosion but there was no thundering boom. But she felt a vibration in her chest, shaking her so hard it made her teeth rattle.
She looked up stunned and glanced around and saw a crack appear in the distance of the silky milk white waters. An impossible crack that became longer and longer, stretching and slicing through the waves, traveling toward the shore. She watched as it divided the waters and the cotton soft shore, branching off along the way like ground lightning. Anything that got in its way became cracked as well as it went on through and kept going. Although it was impossible to tell how, she knew it was alive, sentient, angry and on a mission.
Unable to move, pinned to the spot in fear, Mayra watched as it snaked slowly in her direction for a moment then shot out rapidly! She squeezed her eyes shut and screamed. Then she felt something grab hold of her wrist and pull her along. Opening her eyes she discovered she was no longer on the ground but flying. No, not flying, being dragged through the sky by the angel, a pale thin hand emerged from the white light body and secured itself around her wrist. Her body whipped up and down and left and right like a flag in a gale storm but she felt no pain as if divorced from the stress of the physical demands on her ragdoll body. Perhaps it had something to do with being within the angel’s aura. She ventured a look behind and saw with astonished terror that the crack had leapt from the shore and was forking its way through the air itself. As the angel flew faster, the crack not only matched speed but it was slowly gaining on them, plotting an ominous path toward her flapping feet. She tried to call to the angel but found it hard to breath with the wind whipping in her face.
Mayra turned her head back to the crack that was now only mere inches away. The angel began flying in an evasive pattern and she quickly lost sight of the crack. She twisted her head desperately, this way and that, but was unable to see where it went. It wouldn’t remain a mystery for long. The crack had zigged and zagged until it was above and behind the angel and herself. It plummeted toward them. Then Mayra felt a sharp pain in her left heel and heard the horrifying sound of flesh tearing. She let out a blood curdling scream and shot a glance down to her leg and her mind froze. The crack was cutting through her flesh, muscle and bone and traveling up her ankle, calf, thigh…
The angel stopped, hovering in midair and pulled Mayra up by the shoulders. The mouths on their shifting faces opened and closed, speaking to her but she couldn’t hear anything over her own screams as the crack separated her crotch, her torso, her breasts, her neck and finally her head.
***
Mayra sat bolt upright in bed, shivering. Her nightshirt, drenched in sweat, was now see-through. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop the shaking. She immediately became aware of a voice that struck like a shaft of light through the fog clouds existing between her dreaming and consciousness state, illuminating a series of images which flashed at an ultraliminal speed. The voice, not her own though it came from within her, translated these images into a thought, a single phrase that repeated itself. As it rose in intensity and severed the last tether of sleep, she parted her lips and whispered, “Heaven is dead.”
MADD FICTIONAL 