-August 31st-

A face.

Sagging and distorted with eyes that were solar eclipses and skin that was as leathery as the wings of a hundred bats stitched together. It had a mouth that was extended and perforated and it leaked out a voice the gave him strange, soft words that belonged nestled on pillows like hotel mints.

It was the face of a scarecrow bundled up for the winter.

Everything was so cold.

Except for his face.

***

“You OK, kid?”

***

The sky was full of confetti.

As it fluttered earthward and brushed up against Charlie's face as if he was a lamp attracting moths, he noticed that no two ash-flakes were the same.

Charlie was aware that he had a wool blanket pulled all the way up to his chin and that there were people laying next to him in the ash-fall like winded children after a pillow fight, laughing and watching goose-feather down spin in the air.

But instead of laughing, the man laying to his right was coughing up blood.

And there was an older child to his left who was absolutely still and smelled of urine and gasoline.

Everything was so bright.

The sudden contrast of colors made everyone's faces as pale as political prisoners sent away to work in Siberia, where their skin froze and their fingers and toes shriveled up into dried fruits.

At the moment, the only thing that concerned Charlie was not the confetti falling from heaven or the people at his sides or the corpse-pale nurses with wispy hair checking his pulse, but the fact that even though he was bundled up to the chin, cold was seeping down through his nose and into his chest.

His heart, trying to keep warm, was ribcaged by icicles.

***

“Here, hon. This'll help you sleep.”

***

In the dream, Mother was burning up.

He was a thousand miles away, duct-taped to a chair, and set in front of a television where he could see Mother screaming his name while being tarred-and-feathered with flames that waved and nodded and crackled.

It didn't matter how much Charlie screamed.

It didn't matter how much he begged.

Or pleaded.

Or prayed.

Because this was all a dream and Mother was already wrapped up in a body bag somewhere with burnt-toast skin and her blood drawing flies.

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I suppose that most people consider a dream to be an escape. A distraction from the world, from misery or pain or the face that stares back at us through the mirror. Most dreams are forgotten overnight. The mind spends hours sculpting little brush strokes of color and emotion and hope and despair and then burns the film reel, so that it curls up like snails sprinkled with salt, before waking up. I suppose that's part of the escape. It's the mind venting its system the same way mothers with broken hearts scream into pillows until the feathers inside are bloated with desperation and hate.

But me.

I remember every single dream I've ever had.

Most of them are the same story over and over again, reruns of shoddy sitcoms on late night television, and they don't bother me so much.

But the ones that are different scare me.

I can't deal with that kind of change.

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-September 3rd-

Charlie's eyes cracked open and light splashed into them like buckets of water passed by fire brigades onto flame-crowned houses. At first the light was too much and Charlie retched twice, and groans and spit came out instead of stomach acid and whatever he had eaten that morning. His mouth felt as if it was filled with cottony spider eggs. His throat was charred and he could've sworn that someone was scraping soot off of his larynx with a chimney sweep's wire brush.

The sky was beeping and there was someone moving next to him.

She was wearing a white uniform and her face was prematurely lined with concern and exhaustion and her eyes were full of other people's tears. Charlie thought that she smelled a lot like dying relatives and when she whispered to herself, she was a priest reciting last rites to souls as white as the rabbits that magicians carry around in their capitalist top hats.

But he couldn't concentrate on her face or her smell or what she was whispering.

He couldn't concentrate on anything.

His mind was all smog and haze.

The woman turned, saw his eyes split open, and smiled as she counted out a handful of pills and put them in a cup next to his bed.

“How ya doin', Charlie?”

Charlie tried to answer but his jaw – and his whole face for that matter – was a heavy, steel trap rusted over. His words sputtered out of his mouth and drooled down his chin and he almost lost focus of the woman's face as his mind started slipping in and out of consciousness again.

He was disgusted with himself.

He felt broken.

“Yeah, don't worry. We'll have you fixed up in no time at all. You just need to rest, 'kay? Just close your eyes and me and Doctor Chilton'll have you all better real soon.”

And no matter how much Charlie struggled, his eyelids began to close as if someone with cold fingers was proclaiming him dead, wiping his post-mortem expression from his face, and placing quarters over his eyes.

***

-September 9th-

The hospital was so crowded with dying individuals that the staff had to cram rooms meant for one or two people with five or six beds. And in this hospital, no one was silent during the night, unless their breath was clogging up their lungs and their hearts were soldiers without boots freezing in the snow. The walls were alive with noise of death.

With moans.

Prayers.

Speeches.

Screams.

Crying.

Whispering.

Death, Charlie was sure, was having a busy night. Charlie imagined him making rounds, poking his head into all these rooms crowded with people and collecting the weak, freed souls into his arms like pieces of firewood. He wondered what Death did with those souls. He wondered if Death was rough and violent or if he made sure not to wake anyone else as he cradled them in his arms and whispered in their ears.

Death was a train conductor in those halls that night, gently shaking the shoulders of tired, slumped-over passengers and asking for tickets.

Charlie was staring up at the ceiling.

It was his second day in the hospital that he could remember. But Susan, the nurse, had informed him that he had been with her for at least ten. She told him that he had been awfully sick that first week. She told him that she and the doctors had tried as hard as they possibly could – and succeeded – in keeping Charlie out of the ground.

If he strained hard enough, Charlie could remember bits and snatches of that first week.

He remembered Death pacing the hallway outside of his room like a young father with his wife in labor and doctors' hands coaxing a slimy skeleton clothed with skins of tears into the world.

He remembered someone holding his hand and saying words that had were all bloated with Morphine and pills and heart monitors dropping beeps from the sky.

Dropping bombs from the sky.

Cold winters.

Evil men and cancer gnawing on his bones like skinny, homeless dogs nosing through trash cans looking for pig femurs.

It was at night that Charlie was the most awake. It was at night that Charlie could concentrate the best on the noises passing through his walls and onto his bed and under the covers with him where they tickled his stomach and invaded his dreams. When Charlie did sleep at night, he dreamt. And the backdrop for these dreams were always with the sky pulsing like a lava lamp and carnival tents with stage performances inside starring his mother on fire.

He had seen that act enough.

Charlie's face felt heavy.

It felt awkward and hard and he found that he couldn't see very well out of his right eye anymore because something was in it's line of sight. It felt like rising bread dough, puffy like pastries filled up with coagulating jelly. He wanted to feel it, to see it, but his hands were strapped up in casts and there were no mirrors to be found. When he asked Susan about it, she had told him that he was just wearing a lot of bandages to keep his burns from becoming infected.

So he wasn't too bothered by it.

The doctors had kept him alive, after all. They could cure anything else that was wrong with him, too.

Since the evening nurse made her night rounds at around four in the morning and then refilled the IV drips of anyone in pain or anyone awake, the only things Charlie had to keep him occupied were the sounds lying in bed with him. He examined them carefully, like shells found half-buried in sand on the beach, and listened to them as if they were the noises of the ocean recited through the phonograph throats of a conch shell. Some of them scared him. Most of them scared him. But he had learned to listen to the hospital noises from a neutral, purely scientific standpoint.

He tried to divine his mother's voice from the mix.

And sometimes he could hear her voice – small and slight – tagging along with all the other sounds into his room. But it disappeared within seconds of being recognized.

Also, he talked to the other five people in the room.

None of them could hear him or respond, of course, but they listened to his discourses politely like students in a lecture hall.

There was a middle-aged woman.

A policeman.

Two teenage girls.

And a fat old man whose breath at times passed through his nose like saxophone squeaks and sometimes didn't come out of his nose at all.

“What are you guys in for?” he would say. “They caught drivin' the getaway car. I was the only one who made it out alive.”

And then, “Was it Chicago, or some other place? 'Cause Dad was in Chicago on business. Maybe they missed. Maybe the cancer got blown away by God's breath.”

But Charlie was doubtful.

The dance had been so contagious.

God's breath had lit them all on fire like secret documents in wire trashcans and watched them exhale prayers to him in the form of smoke and ash.