“I had another one of those dreams
again,” I said to my sister when she came out to the kitchen in the
morning. She just looked at me as she
walked past me to get a cup out of the cabinet.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table across from
me. She grabbed the little can of sugar
and lifted the spoon out of the can with a heaping pile on it. She pushed the spoon back into the can and lifted
it up with another heaping pile. I just
looked at her and smiled because I knew she’s going to do that at least three
more times before she finally would take a drink. After her fifth spoonful of sugar, she
finally sipped her coffee.
“Which one?” she asked as she put
her cup back down on the table. “Can you
hand me a donut? Please?” I tipped my chair back and reached for a donut. I grabbed the one with sprinkles because I
wanted the chocolate one for myself.
“Thanks. So was it the same dream as you had the other day or was it
different?”
“Well, this time I was being chased
through the woods.”
“You’re always running in your
dreams, Seth” Amy said jokingly.
“Yeah I know, but this one just felt
so real.” I took a sip of my coffee then continued, “I could feel the sweat as
it ran down my face, back, and legs. I knew that if I didn’t get away that I
was going to die. It just felt so real.
I was dodging in and out of the trees as my lungs burned for air. It felt like I was running forever. The thing chasing me just kept getting
closer. I could hear the crunching of
the sticks and leaves behind me.” I stopped for a moment. I leaned back on my
chair again and grabbed the last donut.
“Hey! You didn’t tell me that there
was a chocolate one over there!” Amy exclaimed.
“Sorry Ame, you didn’t ask.” I
laughed as I took a bite out of the donut. “So anyway, I was running, and I
could feel this thing, whatever it
was, getting closer and I knew that I wasn’t going to make it out of these
woods. I wasn’t going to let it win though, not without some kind of fight.” I
sipped my coffee again. It was still a
little too hot for my likes. “Then as I was running my left arm got torn open
by a branch. I remember yelling ‘Damn it!’ in my dream, but I kept going. I
wasn’t about to let a little cut stop me.
I soon noticed that the cut was bigger than I thought when I felt my
shirt soaking up all of the blood. I
looked down at my arm and then back in front of me. I don’t know how I didn’t
notice it, but there was a tree right there.
I somehow managed to dodge to the left, but not in enough time…that’s
when I cut open my right arm.”
“Christ, Seth! Could your dream be
any worse?” Amy interrupted.
“Oh, it gets better… or worse…ok, so
I just cut open my right arm. After bumping into the tree I stumbled and almost
fell to the ground -- luckily I caught my footing and kept on running, but then
the thing chasing me grew silent.” I took another sip of my coffee and a bite
out of my donut, “I could still feel its presence, but it was being very quiet
as it ran behind me. Finally, I saw this clearing only a couple yards away and
I have hope of making it out of there.
This thing chasing me didn’t like the light and tends to only stick to
shadows. I made it to the threshold of
the trees and jumped through, only to force myself to the ground! There was a drop off only inches away from
where I landed. As I looked around me I
saw that the clearing that I was in was only about as big as our tiny bathroom. I turned back towards the woods and I saw the
creature coming right for me. It didn’t
look like it was about to stop! It leaped
out of the woods, and all I could see was its scary yellow eyes and dark green
scaly skin as it tackled me over the edge.
We both just fell. I was so
scared at that point, but I knew it was pointless to even worry about calling
for help or screaming.” I took a drink of my coffee, this time it was just
right.
“So then what happened?” Amy asked
like a second grader waiting to hear the end of her favorite bedtime story.
“We lived happily ever after. The
end.” I joked.
“Shut up, and tell me what happened,
or I’m going to throw this donut at you!”
I waved my hands to ward off any
donut pieces that might come my way, “Ok, ok. So we are both falling, and the
creature is below me. As I’m turning in
the air, I see that the creature spreads out some wings from its back and
pushes itself towards the ground faster and faster. Just as I think it’s going to hit the ground,
it turns its head towards the sky followed by the rest of the body, and it just
soared toward the horizon. It was so amazing! I forgot that I was even falling anymore; I
was in such shock! Then, I woke up.”
“Wow. That is one crazy dream you
had there, Seth”
“You’re telling me.” I stood up and
downed the rest of my coffee. “I just wish I knew what it all meant and why I
keep having these weird dreams.” With
that, I left the room. Amy said something, but I just ignored it. Amy is great but sometimes she’s just too
much.
***
Looking in the mirror at my face I
could see the bags under my eyes. The
lack of sleep is really getting to me.
My hair slides in front of my eyes, everyone is always telling me that I
need to cut my hair, but I’m just not ready to get rid of it yet. I start to walk over to the tub when I caught
something in the mirror. My shirt,
there’s red on my shirt. I paused for a
moment and lifted the sleeve of my shirt up.
There is a very tiny cut on my arm. “Hmm, that’s odd. Wonder when I did that?” I took my t-shirt off and got as close the
mirror as I could so I could check my arm out without straining my neck. I pushed and pulled the skin around the cut
to see if any more blood would seep out, but nothing did. I don’t know what coerced me to check my
other arm, but when I did there was a very thin line of blood sliding down my
arm.
I turned on the hot water and then
the cold and just let the water run for awhile.
I sat on the edge of the tub, thinking, and thinking about my dream,
what it could mean, and why both of my arms were cut open and bleeding. Steam started to rise up around me, and I
pulled the lever to make the shower turn on.
I stripped out of my shorts and stepped into the shower, facing the
opposite wall of the shower head, just letting the water bounce off of my
skin. The massaging water felt so good
on my back.
“Seth!” Amy was outside knocking on
the door. There were a few more words after my name but I couldn’t make them
out.
“You know I can’t hear you when I’m
in here! What do you want!?” I yelled so she could hear me over the water.
“Are you going to be in there long?
Cause I need to get a shower and stuff before I leave for work.” This time she shouted as loud as she
could.
“I’ll be done in five minutes!” I looked down and saw that the tub was
clogging up with water. I reached down
and grabbed the glob of hair that was preventing the water from draining down
the pipe. “Why doesn’t SHE ever do
this?” I stuck the hair on the side of the shower so I could throw it away when
I got out. “Sometimes I just don’t like her”
So much for a nice long hot shower, I
quickly finished and got dressed. The
cuts on my arms fell out of my short term memory, but I was still playing back my
dream in my head.
“It’s all yours, Ame.” I called to
her as I opened the door and threw away the wad of her hair in the trash
can.
“Thanks, Seth.” she said as she
pushed past me into the bathroom. This
is the time that I hated living in an apartment with my sister. I went out to my room, which any person
living by themselves would call a living room, and turned on the TV. When she asked if she could stay with me,
while she got back on her feet, I didn’t expect to be persuaded from my
room. I made my bed back into the couch
and folded my sheets, putting them in the chest that we have as our coffee
table and sat down on the couch. I
flipped through the channels aimlessly, not even paying attention. All I could think about were the yellow eyes
jumping at me. I shivered and shook my
head as the water shut off in the bathroom and the door opened. Amy scooted down the hallway with her towel
wrapped around her head, and her robe clung to her body. She walked into her room and then I heard the
door shut.
“…weird dreams just call
1-800-693-7326. Again, if you are being
plagued by weird dreams just call 1-800-MY DREAM, 693-7326.” I heard the
commercial on the TV and quickly grabbed the pencil sitting on the stand next
to the couch and then the paper pad on the other stand on the other side of the
couch and quickly wrote down the number.
“What are the odds of that?” Usually
I hate it when commercials use letters to describe their numbers, but this time
it was a big help.
An hour has passed, and Amy was just
now coming out of her room from her shower.
I flipped off the TV as she came down the hall.
“Whuddya think?” her usually
straight blonde hair was now in curls, and she had a bunch of make up on. The bright red skirt was conforming to her
long skinny body. She would have been
kicked out of school for wearing that dress, but growing up in a Catholic School the color enough would have
gotten her kicked out.
“I thought you were going to work?”
“Can’t a girl get dressed up without
someone questioning her motives or where she is going?” She smoothed her skirt down and walked over
to the door. She slipped into her high
heels.
“Come on… we both know that you are
not going to work dressed like that. You
got fired again didn’t you? Where are you going? Really?”
“To work with Todd”
“That guy you’ve been…” I stopped
and shook my head trying to get the visual out of my head. “Oh I get it.”
“You know how I am, Seth. I can’t be cooped up in this apartment all
night like some nerdy twenty four year old banker.” She glanced up at the clock.
“This nerdy twenty four year old
banker is the one that is paying for you to live here. You’re lucky mom is living in California because you’d
be staying with her if she was here.” I scowled at her. “You have to look for
jobs this week. I can’t keep paying for
everything around here.”
“Good night, Seth. Don’t wait up.” She opened the door and turned around and
winked at me then walked out closing the door behind her.
I waited a couple minutes after Amy
left before I even thought about picking up the phone. I didn’t want her to know that I was going to
call this dream thing. It would be too
embarrassing to be caught talking with some stupid TV ad about my dreams. I sat there on the couch staring at the
phone, playing the number through my head.
Finally, I dialed the number that I saw on the TV. The phone didn’t even ring before an automated
voice answered the call. “Hello and
thank you for calling Dreams-R-Us. If
you would like this message in Spanish, please push the number one. If you would like to continue in English
please, stay on the line.” The voice paused for a second and then the phone
clicked in my ear. “We are here to help.
If you are calling about a dream that involves being naked in public,
please press one. If you are calling
about a dream that involves being lost, please press two. If you are calling about a dream that
involves being chased, please press three.
If you are calling about a dream that involves falling, please press
four. If you are calling about a dream
about having sex with a friend, please press five. If you have had a dream involving more than
one of these or any other dream, please stay on the line.” The voice stopped and then elevator-like
music started to play in the background through the phone. I sighed but continued to listen to it,
hoping that someone would soon pick up on the other side.
“This is ridiculous!” I said to
myself as I waited, sitting on the couch with the phone to my ear. “Why am I even doing this?” The question has
been running through my head since I picked up the phone and dialed it, but now
I asked myself out loud.
“Dreams-R-Us…” a man picked up just
as I pulled the phone away from my ear and pressed the power button..
“What was I thinking?” I asked as I
spread myself across the couch, and pulled out some files from my backpack that
I brought home to work on this weekend.
“Maybe working on this stuff will get my mind off of these stupid
dreams.” I worked for about ten minutes before the silence got to me. What was I doing home on the weekend? I think
I’m an attractive man. I got a good
build. I’m smart. Maybe that was it, I’m smart. My mind just raced with a bunch of thoughts,
before I grabbed the TV remote and turned the television on to drown out the
thoughts. “Oh goody… Roseanne is on.” I
turned the volume up, threw the files on the floor, and laid there with my
hands behind my head. A couple minutes
later I felt my eyes getting heavy and my head rolling.
***
I was running, only this time it
wasn’t for my life, it was for someone else’s.
It was like I was on a mission for the CIA or the FBI. I knew what I had to do and I was on my way to
do it. I had to save my sister. I had to save Amy. She was going to die if I didn’t reach her in
time. Someone had taken her hostage and
was about to kill her if she didn’t give them the information that they
wanted. I was only a few blocks
away. I didn’t know what I was going to
do when I finally got there, but I knew that it wouldn’t matter. My instincts would kick in when the time was
right and everything would go just fine.
I get to the door and bust through it.
“Amy!!” I called as loud as I could.
“Amy, where are you?”
“Welcome Seth. Nice of you to come,”
a voice came from the shadows. A light
turned on and enveloped Amy who was sitting in a chair bound with rope and
gagged with duct tape. The figure that
had spoken to me was standing just out of range of the light.
“What do you want with her!?” I asked as calmly as I could manage. That’s
when the figure lifted a gun from the shadows and pointed it point blank at
Amy’s head. The man started to chuckle
and then burst out in a full evil laughter.
He pulled the trigger and I could see Amy’s head open on the opposite
side of the gun, brains flying everywhere.
I dropped to knees crying. “Why?! Why would you do this?”
***
I jumped off of the couch and fell
to the ground weeping. “It was just a
dream,” I said trying to catch my breath.
If I didn’t breathe right, I was going to hyperventilate. I pushed myself to the couch and sat with my
back resting against it. Tears rolled
down my face. “Why do I keep having such
weird dreams? What do they mean” I wept
to no one but myself. I hugged my knees
closer to my chest.
The phone rang, and I jumped at the
sound. I slowly crawled to the end table
and grabbed the phone. “H-,” I cleared my voice, “hello?”
“Seth Brackard?” the voice asked over
the phone.
“Yes this is him?” I said with a
quavering voice. “Who’s this?
“I’m Officer Erik Summers; I work
with the NYPD. I have some bad
news.” The officer said without any hint
of emotion. “I will need you to come down to the station. I have a few
questions for you and also need you to ID a body.”
My heart jumped into my throat and
my eyes filled back up with tears “What is it? What happened?” I tried to
demand.
“I’ll need you to come down to the
station before I can answer any questions” Summers replied.
“Fine! I’ll be there in ten minutes”
I said trying to sound as tough as I could.
My body was shaking.
I drove down to the station and met
with Officer Summers. He took me to the
morgue in his car. We walked down the
long hallway with white and black checker board floor and the high white
ceilings. The walls were white and the
windows had bars on them. Kind of a
bright place, for all the darkness that must take place in this building. We walked through the steel doors at the end
of the hallway and stopped in the middle of the room, in front of a table. The table had a covered body on it. “Why have you brought me down here, Officer?”
He just looked at me. His stare was blank,
nothing in his eyes told me what I was about to see. Nothing could have prepared me for what
happened next. Summers pulled back the
sheet from the head of the body. I
barely recognized the face I was now staring at. The only thing that I could really make out
was the curly blonde hair. That damned
blonde hair that was clogging the drain this morning, now laid strewn about on
this cold metal table sopping the now cold red blood from her face. There was a
big hole through her head. Anyone else
would have complained about the smell, but I hadn’t noticed it. My nose was stuffed and tears welled up in my
eyes and fell down my cheeks.
“Is this your sister, Amy Brackard?”
The officer asked coldly as tears streamed down my face.
***
I don’t remember anything that
happened after Summers asked me if that was Amy. I’m not even sure what happened to me
then. A lot has changed since Amy’s
death, but not everything. I am still
living in the same apartment, still sleeping in the same spot. I didn’t have the heart to touch anything in
her room. Every morning I get the donuts
and come back to my lonely apartment and sit at the kitchen table. I only eat the donuts with sprinkles on them
and leave the chocolate ones there. My
dreams have stopped since that night. I
still don’t know what they meant, except the last one. Most people say that you always dream, you
just don’t always remember them, I don’t believe them; I just simply don’t
dream anymore.
