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At the top of the town, on the top floor of the house, at the top of the bed, a child sleeps in their room curled up on a pillow like a great big dog; and like a dog, they kick and bite into a pillow as they dream.
This child has many memorable dreams. There are some when a girl is there and they are adventuring through a world from a screen brought to life. Before they know it the girl turns into a ginormous dragon, so the child sits on her back and they both fly into the sun hooting and hollering and screaming with joy.
There are some with another girl, an antlered girl, and it is the past. They both sit in a huge ferris wheel (or, perhaps it seems huge because they are both children) and the child is rocking back and forth and back and forth and giggling and she is screaming for them to stop but they absolutely will not because where on earth would the fun in that be?
There are some with their parents and their brother, and perhaps they are sitting at a dinner table or a television set and are all smiles; or perhaps their smiles are broken and fractured and no one is together and they are all alone and weeping in their rooms.
Sometimes the child simply dreams they are a dog chasing a ball, or rolling in mud puddles, or eating something they shouldn’t. These dreams are the ones they like most.
There are other dreams where they remember less. These often feature a different yet similar girl, but her face refuses to take shape in their mind like the others. The back of her is clear enough; a flannel shirt, long brown hair which descends down her back like a chocolate milk waterfall, and a pair of antlers jutting out the top her head like a pair of cool blue corals. Their brother is there too, and the other antlered girl from the ferris wheel, and they are running through the forest behind the graveyard looking for a monster that might be lurking behind a fence or a dilapidated wall or a tree. But as soon as she turns to face them, her face, like chalk on a sidewalk in rain, seems to melt away and spiral and become nothing but pebbly static.
Sometimes they remember holding her hand, but her hand is all dark, like living shadow, and it grips tighter and tighter and tighter and just as it starts to feel like their own hand will be crushed in its grip they bolt upright, wide awake. After a dream like this, they rush to the bathroom and scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub as if holding it was like gripping poison ivy and if they do not wash away the darkness their hand will melt and spiral and twist like her face always does. And once the washing is done they will clomp clomp clomp up the stairs like a zombie and return to a foetal position and try their hardest to sleep and forget that they’d ever remembered. In the morning, they wash their hands again even though they’re completely spotless. They could never explain why.
But there are some dreams this child never ever remembers. And it isn’t simply because they don’t want to. Something about these dreams slides off of their brain like water down the sink.
They always start with a tree. Sometimes the tree is like the one from their dreams and games, the ones with magic and the dragon and where everyone can be friends if you find the right words, and its pixelated leaves drop and dance downwards at ten frames per second. Sometimes this tree is green on a white canvas, and is freshly drawn with a crayon piece which has shortened down to the tiniest nub after so many tracings and retracings and retracings. Sometimes it is a real tree, and its leaves are the golden yellow like the ones behind their house, or behind their school, or behind the graveyard.
There is a man here, too. He usually does not speak, being more interested in listening. If he does speak, he does so to try and make the child laugh, or think, or perhaps to encourage them to speak themselves.
In the dreams where the child finds by a fake tree, a dreamed up tree, things are very strange indeed. They could be in the middle of a dream, either made from memory or make-believe, but when they turn a corner or retrace their steps or simply trip into a wall everything suddenly changes and the tree is there and a man there too.
Whatever continuity there was but a moment ago goes out the window. This is a place outside of any story. It’s somewhere unfamiliar yet familiar; a dark space, an unreal space, one made of shapes and colours and ideas from dreams and memories before and since. They sometimes find themselves in their make-believe clothes, sometimes in the striped pullover they wear even to sleep, or sometimes it’s the former in one moment, then the latter in the next. They move to look behind the tree and there is a man. Or perhaps the man is the tree. Or perhaps he is neither. As I say, it’s all terribly confusing.
The man says nothing but means well. Of course, the child doesn’t know how he means well because he doesn’t say a word, but he does. He hands them an egg. It’s a cream coloured thing with a hard, chalky shell. There is a wrongness about it, like it’s unhappy being held, like it doesn’t want to sit still and if they take their eyes off it for even a second it would disappear. If they were to put their ear to it, they could hear the rolling waves of water, as if they’d found a conch and the ocean inside. But even if the thing is strange and makes them uneasy, it clearly means a lot to the man. He wouldn’t have given it as a present otherwise. As I say, he means well enough.
So, egg in hand, they turn to leave and the dream resumes as if it had never been interrupted in the first place. Only, for some reason, they have an egg now. They forget why.
In the dreams where the child has a canvas to sketch upon, dreams made from memories and fragments of reality, a man is watching them with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. He asks them to draw the people in their life. They draw their parents, whose sad shapes are far apart and brim with tears and have great scribbly frowns. They draw their brother, his hand outstretched to hold another, grasping nothing but a great scrawl of black pastel. They always scribble this particular patch of black with a terrified vigour. They draw their neighbour, the one from the ferris wheel, and she is far in the distance, calling and searching and looking and finding nothing in distant trees. The child draws themselves in the middle, and despite their fractured family and friends they always draw themselves with a single line for a mouth. There is no expression, no sadness, no anything.
They sometimes draw the man, too, and he is also behind a tree. Or perhaps he is the tree? And the great bushel of leaves are a strange representation of his face? It’s hard to tell, especially when the child is constantly drawing over it again and again and again, never satisfied with the end result. Clearly the man is hard to picture. Once the crayon is reduced to a tiny green pill, the man picks up the drawing, squints, and mumbles,
‘Well… there… is a man here?’
And the child bursts out laughing, clearly amused by some joke that the man does not understand, but he is simply glad the child is smiling for once, so he laughs along too.
At the end of their visits, he tells them,
‘Put on your coat, wash your face, and get dressed!’
Perhaps the man says this because it’s important to remember the little things which you might otherwise forget. These things are no less important despite how run of the mill they appear. Sometimes he mixes the words up, and the child squeals with mirth at the prospect of washing one’s coat and putting on a face.
He also gives the child an egg. It’s important. Or, certainly, it’s important to the child because it’s one of those candy eggs with a prize inside. They’re overjoyed because you can’t get them in Hometown since the mayor banned food that you could probably, potentially, possibly choke on. To the man it’s simply a toy with a chocolate wrapping; something he’s happy to part with. The man doesn’t tell the child how he got them, and the secret fills them with endless curiosity and giddiness. It’s the only thing they would accept at the end of their sessions; lollipops, sodapop and gumdrops are all rejected roundly. Perhaps it’s because the eggs are illegal, and therefore naughty, that they like them so much. Maybe it’s because of the toy inside which can be added to their innumerable collection of plastic and woolen and wooden friends. When they try to open it, they immediately wake up to find themselves weeping gently, but happily somehow, and they don’t know why.
The third kind of dream is the rarest one of all. When they wake from it they feel the way one does when, in the middle of a rain storm, you accidentally squish a snail under your shoe. A wave of sadness and frustration and disgust, except it is infinitely worse and lasts for hours and hours and hours and they can’t shake it off because they don’t know why they’re feeling it in the first place.
In this dream, they find the man behind a tree, the golden leaves obscuring his face. The child runs up to him and immediately takes his hand. They drag him far south, down a long and winding path towards something old and rusted. He doesn’t ask any questions, he doesn’t say a single thing, because he knows what it is that he’s being brought to and he knows why the child would bring him there, in particular. They’ve told him a lot about it; or, at least, they’ve drawn it a lot. He’s also noticed how frightened the child is, how pale their face is. They even forgot to wear their horns today, the little red pair they always have on their head to feel safe.
They stop at the big metal door. He looks at the child and says that he doesn’t know how to get in, that he doesn’t know the code. What he means is that they should go home now, that they don’t have to go any further, that they don’t need to do all of this to prove that a black scribbled thing is inside. The child responds by putting in the code themselves. The electronic lock at the top clicks and the door swings ajar.
A smell assaults the two as air rushes inside then out like the tide, or the breathing of a great slumbering thing. It smells like bad breath, of damp, of staleness and of something worse that they can’t place. He looks to the child, who is staring at him with the most terrified, desperate eyes he’s ever seen, and knows that unless he goes in and proves that it’s safe (or, well, not safe, but not unsafe because of something that lives inside) they will never let themselves sleep or feel safe enough to let go of the dark feelings inside their chest that have haunted canvas after canvas after canvas. This, to him, is the most important thing in the world, so he swallows his unease and pries the jaws a little further open.
It is dark. Darker than dark. It’s as if the sunshine outside dims as that door creaks open further and further open, exposing that blinding darkness to the world. There is a noise coming from inside that feels like darkness too. It’s almost as if it’s water, but then it starts to sound like the great grinding sounds of something huge and metal, but then it starts to sound like a voice, laughing, or screaming, or a mixture of the two. Like darkness, the more you try to focus on it, the more you think you can perceive.
He sneaks a glance at the child, who is staring at the darkness now, sweat dripping off them like the anxious kind of rain that begins to fall before a storm breaks. His face gently twists into one of panic too, despite himself. He knows that he needs to be an adult for them. He knows that he needs to be brave for them. He knows that he needs to walk inside and prove that it’s safe. But when he looks into that blackness he can’t help but think of those black, angry scribbles that the child always draws and for the first time he understands just how frightening they were supposed to be.
His eyes return to the inky black.
He takes a step forward.
Then another.
Another.
He is out of sight.
The sound of the darkness is gone. The only thing which can be heard is the child’s hard and heavy breathing, panic blooming in their heart like a great flower as the seconds turn into tens of seconds before turning into a minute of silence.
Then footsteps break through the lack of noise as the man looms into view, his face the only thing breaching past the darkness.
He is smiling, but it is so painfully obvious that he is terrified.
He tries to find words, but only has time for six.
‘Well,
There is a man here,’
And very suddenly, but not so suddenly that the child does not see what happens next in excruciating detail, hands reach out from the darkness. Hundreds of them. Some are clawed and as dark as the stuff from which they spawned from, others are grey and soft and strange and sad, others white and bony and cruel. All reach forward and grab the man by his lapels and his cuffs and his legs and his face and his mouth and yank him backwards and into the black.
The last pair of hands that the child sees before they wake up and forget all about it are white. They have egg shaped holes through their centers.
The hands beckon them to come and join their fun.
You might think that this would be an image that would stick in the mind like a pin to a board, but though the sweat has run right through their covers and their face is red and awash with tears, they cannot bring themselves to remember why.
Or,
Perhaps that is unfair. Perhaps they simply cannot remember, and no amount of effort or intentionality could let it become a memory.
A bad, forgetful dream it will always be for them, I expect.
At least for now.
Why am I telling you all of this?
I forget.
Never mind the joke,
Perhaps I feel that you might remember it, or bear it.
It’s easy to imagine something that’s never happened to you; it’s harder to hold onto something which has.
Perhaps I just need someone to know, and every time I tell someone all of this my heart feels a little lighter, despite my knowing that it will all wash away in the ocean of memory.
So it’s yours now. My gift to you.
Or is it a gift to me?
Maybe it’s both.
I’m sorry. It’s all rather mixed up.
Thank you, either way.
When you see them again, remember what they’ve been through. What they’ve seen.
They cannot remember it, but it doesn’t mean they can’t feel it.
So,
For them, for me,
Don’t forget.