Missives From the Dreaming #17

NOTE: In the first few paragraphs the pronouns change. Due to the story, where it is sort of me and my dream self, I was not sure whether to use "I" or "We". Please give me feedback on what sounds best!

Missives From Dreamtime #17

I had a dream.

It was a few nights ago, I can’t remember precisely how many.

I wandered through a labyrinth of tall gray buildings that melted into the sky. In the way of the subconscious, I did not live the dream alone. There was someone else. The I-not-I. The face in the mirror you don’t recognize. The one who stands beside you and in your own footsteps. I lived the dream with her. My shadow-sister.

We (it might have been a we- two minds in one body) walked through the concrete maze, underneath the hanging black threads of laundry lines and electric wires woven into the sky. A constant electric buzz cut through the air, filling me to my fingertips. The world had the gray look of war photographs, but pale, big-eyed children still played in the streets. A soccer ball tangled with my feet. As We turned to kick it, We noticed someone behind me. Off in the distance, a tall, blue smudge with a shock of blonde on top stood very still. I kicked the soccer ball down the street and turned away. I had to be somewhere urgently. But the feeling of someone watching me, the scurrying of icy spiders up my spine, persisted. Animal instinct took over as fear blossomed in my chest.

I took a left down an alley into the basement stairwell of my elementary school. Frozen at the bottom of the green tiled steps, through the tan metal staircase that matched the shining walls, I watched three girls practice a play on the landing. They held crumpled sheets of paper in their hands. Dream logic told me safety was just up the steps and around the corner.

My feet would not move. The sound of electric current reached me even in here. Glancing back, I saw a tall boy, my age, golden-haired, no longer a shape in the distance. He loomed in the entrance of the alley. The buildings did not dwarf him like they did everyone else. Instead, they elongated him, stretched him out thin and papery, his skin the color of crumbling mortar. The blue shirt he wore, that I had seen in the distance, seemed to be the only thing keeping him from sinking into the concrete.

He smiled slowly like he was pulling back curtains. Something glinted silver in his mouth. Run, whispered the power in the wires.

And I did.

Up the steps, three at a time like I did when I was ten. Pushing past the shrieking girls, my feet slapped the tile as I wound upward. They went up only two flights, fitting neatly into memory. Two tan doors with thin windows in the middle stood closed at the top. I shoved my shoulder into one, expecting it to fly open, but it only rattles in its hinges. Frantically, I pushed at the other. Locked as well.

I looked over the railing at the steps but saw no one, not even the girls I had passed by below. Instead, the staircase now appeared to twist down forever, forming increasingly smaller boxes of tan and green that darkened into shadow way down below. There was no sign of the boy but the hum in my head was increasing to the point of pain. I turned back to the doors, but there he stood.

This close, I could see the pockmarks in his skin.

The electricity whispers that the stairs had vanished, the dream trapping me in this moment.

I step forward, “Get out of my way.” They are the first words I have ever said and they hang in the air.

For a moment, nothing happens and I wonder if this boy only understands stone and sand, if maybe I have to rap out a message in morse code on the floor the communicate. But then he nods at me and steps forward.

He bows deeply, like a prince, with a wide sweep of his arm and a steep sloping of his back. The boy straightens, then grasps my hand and bows over once more, as if to kiss it. I again see the glint of metal in his mouth. His hand crushes my fingers.

Snick.

There is no pain, just a pinch, then the faint feeling of air brushing against exposed muscle and bone, and the first two fingers on my left hand are gone to the knuckle.

He straightens slowly, mouth stretched into a rictus grin. His lips are pulled tight over dull silver teeth that fit together neatly, trapping my lost fingers behind them.

I stand there, staring. I cannot move, for all the world a butterfly pinned to a mounting board. The boy opened his mouth, and let out a laugh like television static. Behind the vorpal teeth, I could see my fingers wriggling on his swollen red tongue.

Still laughing, he turned around and opened one of the doors. It swung open compliantly for him, and he waved his hand from me to the door. I was supposed to step through. Whatever had been holding me snapped, and I stumbled through the door into darkness.

I woke after that. I must have. The sky’s the same blue. My house is of red brick, not gray cement. People call me by my name, but I have covered all the mirrors in my bedroom. In the school hallway, on the street, I keep my eyes down. Sometimes, though, sometimes I forget myself. I glance up in a mirror while washing my hands. The cold track of spider feet up my back forces me to look up. A stranger catches my eye as he walks past. He grins in greeting, iron teeth glinting in the fluorescent lights.

I do not recognize the face in the mirror. The cast of the eyes, the shape of the mouth are unfamiliar. Alien.