The sharp, unwelcome sensation of rain on my face ripped me from my dreams.
Grandpa had been talking, but I hadn’t been listening. These days, he had managed to mumble on for minutes at a time about random things I didn’t quite care about. The moment he brought up the presidential election, I zoned out.
Besides, I would much rather think about Elvin, who was absolutely gorgeous and absolutely fictional. But I hadn’t even gotten to that part of the dream yet before the rain started.
Grandpa didn’t seem to realize it was raining, but I didn’t really mind. I had grown to enjoy the sensation of rain hitting bare skin. Fog covered the air in a fleece blanket, and the clouds moaned with quiet slumber and restlessness. The sun hit off blades of blue grass in our dewy lawn. I press my feet into the soft grass, feeling the wet rain go in-between my toes.
Grandpa stops talking all of a sudden and turns around with a plate full of hot dogs. “I think I’ve got them perfect.” He sets them down on the table. “Well, sweet cornsticks, when did it start raining?”
The corner of my lip turns up at the sound of cornsticks. It was something I used to say when I was little when I didn’t know what corn on the cob was, and he still made fun of me for it today.
“Just started a minute or two ago,” I say. “We can stay outside if you prefer.” Meaning: please let me stay outside. I don’t mind if the bun gets a bit soggy. It wasn’t even raining that hard anyway. The wind was only a slight push, and the sky was something I wanted to watch forever. Someone had scattered the stars that night.
Grandpa shrugs. “I guess if you would like. Just tell me if you ever want to go inside. I’m going to go and grab the buns and some sides. You just wait out here.” He sets the hot dogs on the table. I’d never been one to like hot dogs, but it was hot dog night, and that was never going to change. At least tomorrow we’d be having roasted veggies.
There’s a blue in the sky just behind my birch tree that’s the exact color of Elvin’s eyes: blue the same color of a dark rumor and sparkles the same way the moon does. I wish I could see Elvin all day, but I guess that’s all I can do - the dreams always end as soon as he talks to me or touches me.
He doesn’t even seem like someone that would be my type. He has a look that screams something like a vampire - pale, paper-like skin, soft, black hair that’s a bit longer than most, and long, gangly fingers. And of course his eyes, which are the most brilliant peacock blue with thick, black lashes that remind me of tarantula legs.
For about the thousandth time, I force myself to stop thinking about him. He’s imaginary, literally a figment of imagination. Still, it seemed like he meant something. After all, I only started seeing him after the accident. Something always seemed to loom around him the same way light seems to make fog look larger.
Grandpa comes out with a tray filled with condiments - ketchup, mustard, relish (his personal favorite), onions, pickles, tomatoes, lettuce, and sour crout. Beside that is a bag of kettle-cooked potato chips and a steaming bowl of rice with roasted broccoli. My favorite.
“So that’s what was taking you so long. Heating up some of my food?” Grandpa knew I wasn’t a fan of hot dog night.
“Who said it’s all for you? Is that something they’re teaching young folk in school today, that any opportunity is automatically something for them? All theirs? It’s ridiculous the way the government is today…” He keeps going, but I zone out. He’d been doing it more often lately. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether a lecture is coming or if he’s just joking, but it always ends up being a lecture. I’m not even sure why I’m hopeful anymore.
Grandma left long before Grandpa did. When I moved into the house after the accident, Grandma was already the way Grandpa is now. I wasn’t really sure then - only nine years old - as to what was going on, but now that I’m down this road again I feel like an old pro. At the same time, I feel like I’m an inexperienced noble.
I dress my hot dog with an assortment of the things Grandpa provides - tomatoes, lettuce, and a small amount of mustard. I’ve never liked pickles… so much as the smell of them alters my taste and I have to try not to breathe. Grandpa knows this, but he hardly cares. “That sound like a you problem.” - my favorite quote from Grandpa.
After I finish my hot dog, Grandpa is still talking, so I quietly excuse myself. He doesn’t seem to notice my leaving and still talks all the while I walk through the door.
The first thing I do after opening the door to my room is run and flounce down on my bed. There’s something so comforting about pretending you’re in the movies… running and bouncing onto bed the same way they always did. I don’t know. I haven’t seem many movies since being moved here after the accident, but I remember my favorite was always The Princess Bride. I watched it with my mom when I was eight with my younger brother. He didn’t understand it, or maybe he just thought it was dumb. I don’t quite remember now. All I remember is that I wondered if something that insane could ever happen to me, and I remember giggling along with my mother as she looked down at me with loving eyes. I didn’t quite appreciate the moment then, but I’d give anything to spend a moment back then.
The fabric is cold in my fingers. I fold my fingers around it, feeling each pad through the thin blanket. Through my open window, wind tunnels through. Cold, early fall air filters into my bedroom and onto my mattress. It’s a weirdly comforting cold: the type that makes you want to snuggle up rather than run away, and instantly, my nostalgia of pre-accident wiped away with the same swiftness of sliding a finger down a foggy mirror.
Almost, but not quite.
An owl hoots from outside my window as the wind stirs its cup of coffee. Softly, I hear outside a mother talking to her daughter. The daughter is yelling at her mother in a harsh, impatient tone. I want to tell her to stop, that someday every conversation she ever had with her mom that wasn’t filled with love will seem like a betrayal, and she’ll want to take them all away the same way you erase lead from paper. I guess that’s the way I should be treating my grandfather, but he might as well already be gone. Soon he’ll be living away from me, and I’ll be living…
I don’t even know where.
That was one of the things I was terrified of. Whatever comes afterward… whatever that may be. Foster care? Adoption? On the streets? I swallow it all down, trying not to think about it. It all is too far away, and therefore it’ll never come.
Maybe.
My feet are wrapped up in the tight grip of the thin sheet. It’s twisted below my ankle, then wraps back up again and flips around. I’m not quite sure how I manage to tie myself up like this, but it seems to happen every night. I lean over to free myself from its iron grip and relax my feet under the covers, sticking out one leg for the cool breeze the air provides, and snuggle my head into the pillow. Hair wraps around my neck like a strangler. I’ve been wanting to cut it for a while but I’ve never found time and Grandpa always seems to forget before it can reach up to two days in his memory.
Soon, I’m counting down from one-thousand, my favorite falling-asleep pastime. It was something my dad taught me when I was little and couldn’t fall asleep. Start at one-hundred and imagine several little bunny rabbits jumping over a fence one by one, escaping their owner’s residency. I always had to set it at one-thousand since I could never fall asleep by one and it was make me more upset than happy if I got there. Still, I wish my father were here, coaching me on how to fall asleep. If I ever had a difficult night, he’d be right there beside me, slowly rubbing my back and telling me funny stories of his childhood until my breath was even and I could no longer listen for my mind was dreaming.
Six-hundred-and-ninety-eight, six-hundred-and-ninety-seven, six-hundred-and-ninety-six…
I am soon in a room filled with fog. I can see nothing except for black and the grey fog and the light that comes from a corner of a room, illuminating a patch of wispy air. My steps make the air scurry away, as if they are afraid. It’s only me in this room, but I know that’s not true. I’ve been here several times before, and soon I would be with someone else.
The door that light peaked through began to creak open, and I never knew when to love it or hate it. Sometimes, she seemed like she hated me for being alive, even if she didn’t voice it. Other times, she just wanted to love me. Regardless, it was all a figment of my imagination, anyway, but it always felt so real when I woke up.
My mother steps through the door. Strangely, she’s seemed to age alongside with me, the same way Elvin does. For most people, the memory of dead people seem to stay in place, unaging, but my dreams carried my mom’s aging. I remember the time she visited me in my dream and I first saw a strand of gray hair rooting through her loose ponytail. It stood out promptly because Mom had dark brown hair that most mistook as black.
I greet my mom as she comes in. Her hair is loosely cascading down her shoulders. Through her aging, she’s managed to stay as gorgeous as I always remembered her. When I was little, I always hoped when I was a teenager I would look as pretty as mom did, but of course, I was disappointed. Now, I have Mom’s black/brown hair but not her piercing blue eyes. Instead I have hazel brown eyes that look like the color of slugs in the morning, my nose is round and spherical, my eyes large and baby-like, and my birth covers up half of my left cheek. But my dad always said I was beautiful, even if I could hardly believe him. And now, of course, I look different than the way I did pre-accident.
“Delphine? Are you here?” Mom emerges from behind the thick fog. I immediately shout her name and run up to hug her. Something had happened for the past week or so - my dreams had been mundane. For the first time since pre-accident, I hadn’t visited mother every day of the week. I had a nightmare three times, one falling dream, two flying dreams, one dream where I was naked, and one strange dream where I was a chicken and for some reason wanted to escape to the moon.
“I thought I’d never see you again!” I shout. My head is buried in Mom’s hair. I am trying not to sob into her.
“I thought I wouldn’t either. I kept showing up here and you never came… I thought maybe you moved on,” said Mom. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by ‘moving on’, but if she meant me moving on from her, that would never happen. Seeing Mom, and maybe Elvin if you want to get specific, was the only reason I wanted to go to bed.
“I would never move on,” I say. Mom nods, as if not believing me, but she had every reason to. I had no idea what the separation had been caused by, but the thought of something like it happening again and me not being in control scared me.
Mom grabs my hand. “How’s Grandpa?” she asks, massaging my palm. A sure sign she was worried or stressed. She seemed to normally be stressed when she came here… well, I guess she doesn’t really come here. My mind imagines it in a dream, and then fake, made-of-memories Mom comes here. I forgot a lot how my family wasn’t real, even if they seemed like it in my dreams.
“He’s fine.” I hadn’t mentioned his muttering to her. If she knew, she’d be upset. I had told her about Grandma and she was devastated when she died. Dad’s parents had died before I was born, so I was living with Mom’s. Losing a second parent… Mom was emotional, and I didn’t think she would be able to handle it, even if she was just a figment of imagination.
I suddenly began to wonder how Tedore and Dad were - if they wondered why I wasn’t showing up when they came. “You are able to have contact with Tee and Dad, right?’
Mom nods, slowly. “Yea? What about it?”
“Can you tell them that I was here? Just in case they’re worried?” I thought of Tee’s sweet little face. He’d been aging too, but he still seemed so little. Now he was twelve, nothing for me to be calling “cute” or “little” about, but memories of him when he was little distorted my vision of him. Tee had been five - four years younger than me - when the accident came.
This place of fog was so weird. It wasn’t real - I was fully aware of that - but the way I could feel the way the fog glided over my fingers and the way the cold was only disrupted by the light that glided out that mysterious door… it was all so weird. The hyper-details that made me feel like I was alive… they were all so real.
“Yeah… I can talk to them. Sometimes. It’s been less and less nowadays.” Mom’s gaze turns away from me.
“What do you mean?” I had always thought that they lived altogether in some heaven-like reality I one day hoped I would be in with them. Sometimes I cursed the miracle that made me survive.
Mom looks at an invisible watch. I always wondered why she did that. It was like she kept her old habits even when she no longer had the items to hold them in place… I guess that’s just dreams keeping their weird formats. “Would you look at that! I’m out of time,” says Mom, making her way to the door.
“Wait, Mom!” She kept walking. “Mom! Come back!” I always wondered what the “limit” was for. It seemed like it wasn’t a real thing at times and at other times it seemed like it was the only thing that pushed their actions was the time limit in the back of their head.
She crosses through the door. They always resisted against telling me what was on the other side of the door, no matter how much I nagged them.
Soon, the door was closed, and I was suited alone in the room filled with fog and smoke, listening only to my own heartbeat. And then came a knock on the door, and in came Elvin.
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