Darkened Dreams

Her romantic mind calls to order the words that lay dormant in the stagnant air of her right brain artistry. Colors she long forgot existed jumped before her very eyes while all in the darkened room lay still. She remembered songs she had sung, but never heard before in this lifetime; flavours that had never touched her tongue; smells that died long before the generation she was born to came into light. A dace, a beautiful face; a beautiful woman stood screaming in flames for the crime of loving her. Him? Her romanticism skipped town as she was pulled into a dream land—no, reality—and back into the darkened room she lay in solitude. The night nurse made his third set of rounds for all the other patients while he checked in on her again. He looks at her with the same face he gave his first day as an employee at this danger ridden place of employment, pity. He pitied her mousy brown hair that she has seen black, blonde, red—she has never once dyed her hair. He pities her emerald gems that dazzle the world from underneath long lifeless bangs—gems that were once topaz, ice, and coal. He pities her arms which once held children, grandchildren; played the piano, harp, violin. Now they lat strapped against her body in a white suit she has been forced into nightly for her “own safety”. He nails, once talons of a majestic bird, are kept so short that her itches lay unscratched until she is writhing in pain—then they “up” her meds. So she reels back the fishing line in her diagnosed “overactive” mind, and by doing so her emerald eyes close as she wills herself back to her dreams of past realities, or as the doctors say, her “pathological lies in which the patient convinces herself to believe are true.” She recalls her favorite love once lived, as a six year old boy who lived too long; and just by remembering her past life, she was granted the ability to relive it. Free of night nurses, pity, white restraint suits, and herself. She became Leo, the child who lived past his destined death.

He winced as the shaman foretold his death to be during the fourth darkness of the days. He was not going to see his sister born during the fifth darkness. She was destined to birth with his death and she would ever the world once his spirit left it. The shaman was never wrong. Leo’s first last day of light was spent preparing his funeral with his mother. Leo’s first last darkness was spent preparing his bedroom to be his younger sister’s. The next two lights and darknesses were exactly the same as the first. Baby Brina stopped fidgeting the next light as the shaman foretold secretly to his mother. Leo was told baby Brina was nervous about being born. She was shy, and destined to be shy. Leo ran. He ran into the woods and toward his fishing crick that, as far as he knew, none of the villagers had any inkling as to the whereabouts. The crick was full up with water so high his fishing rock was covered in ankle deep murky water. He learned the hard way that his rock grew slippery when wet when he fell into the five foot deep water with no ability to swim. Before his vision grew dark he noticed the darkening sky overhead. “Your death will be during the fourth darkness.” He was dying.

Her conscious mind snapped her out of Leo’s life and back into her own. She knew this ending. The river was murky because the embankments were eroding into it, the current was weak, and Leo unknowingly by stretching his arms and legs repeatedly was swimming to a shore he didn’t even know existed. Once his six year old body blacked out from fear and lack of oxygen, this river pushed him onto the shore. While blacked out he coughed out the dirty water that was entrapped in his lungs. Leo lived through the fourth darkness and on the fifth darkness, when his sister’s birth was happening, his eyes opened while his sister was born still. The shaman was wrong. She laughed with an even glint in her eyes as she recalled the end of baby Brina’s life. Leo lived. And with that memory, Nero’s eyes opened and he sit up in bed. His hands reach up to rub his hazel, sleep filled, eyes and his wife rolls over and whispers, “Did you have a bad dream?” And that is all it was, a dream.