The Shadow of Dream

She awoke at about five in the morning to the incoherent shouts of her husband and a firm fist in the face. “Jimmy?” she asked, panicked, stinging still from the blow he landed.

“But… Who… And…” Jimmy was shouting nonsense and flailing his arms about, his face contorted in anger. “It was just… Wha…?”

“Jimmy? Are you okay?” She asked again, shaking him hopes of rousing him from his deeply troubled sleep.

And as though it never happened, his confusing tirade turned to gentle snoring. Unfortunately for Shannon, though, she couldn’t get back to sleep. Her face was hot where the bottom of his fist made contact with her eye and the adrenaline rush of having been aroused from her slumber in that way made it impossible to continue resting. Leaving Jimmy to rest, she got out of bed and wrapped her terry robe around her slender frame and left the bedroom.

Soon enough she found herself in the kitchen, brewing coffee and frying eggs in a skillet. When they were done, she transferred them to a plate and laid them on the table to cool while she got the morning paper.

It was halfway through eating her eggs and toast and reading the opinions section of the news that Jimmy came into the room, bleary eyed and said, “Good morning,” as though nothing had happened.

“Good morning. You okay?”

Pouring himself a cup of coffee, “Sure. Why?”

“Bad dreams…?”

“How’d you know?”

She turned her face to show him the light blue spot on her eye where he’d accidentally bashed her. “You were getting a little violent.”

“Jesus,” he said as he sat down, sipping his steaming coffee, “I did that?”

“Yeah… You were shouting, too, but it was all nonsense.”

He’d chosen a spot across from her and the cracks of golden morning light spilled through the blinds and streaked across the table and up his chest.

“What were you dreaming about?”

“Actually, as it’s coming back to me it was downright horrible.”

“You seemed in a kind of agony.”

“It started out simple enough. We were on a cruise of some type, in the middle of the ocean, which, for some reason that escapes me, was emerald green. I don’t recall seeing you, so much as just knowing you were there, with the kids. Jake and Elizabeth were both there. But we were stranded. The boat couldn’t go anywhere. We had power and provisions, but the boat was anchored. We had no idea how long it would take before we would be getting rescued, only that we were out there indefinitely. Things got weird, but in a civilized sort of way and you had set up some kind of day care in one of the ships holds and there was one kid there that had… I don’t know… some type of communicable disease. It may have been bronchitis, but from the reaction it got, it may as well have been the plague. The kid’s name was Isaac. Not Judy’s Isaac, just an Isaac. He was eight years old.”

Jimmy stopped for a moment to take another sip of coffee. Somberly, he looked out the window, toward the morning light.

“Well, for some reason, him having this sickness bent these two guys completely out of shape. I don’t remember their names or their faces, but they were the sort of guys I just don’t like to be around. They talked with that brash arrogance that kids in high school sports programs seem to. At least the ones I went to school with, they’d drop t’s from words like mountain and g’s from anything that ended in i-n-g. One of them maybe had a black goatee and the other was balding, that’s all I remember about their look. But they were completely incensed about the sickness Isaac carried. There was another part to the dream, I don’t exactly remember what happened, but where things picked up, the two guys so worried about Isaac had decided to kill him.”

Shannon looked on, terrified and rapt at attention.

With a deepening solemnity, Jimmy continued, “I started running through the corridors of the ship, shouting out for Isaac, wanting to protect him. But then I thought he might think I was trying to kill him, too. And I knew that he spent a lot of time hanging around Jake, so I started calling his name out, so as not to draw so much attention. I thought it those guys who wanted to kill him heard me shouting for him, they’d know what I was up to and would find him sooner than I would. It felt like I was running in a corridor without end, passing the same three portholes over and over and over again until finally I was out of breath and found myself in the ships hold that had been turned into a daycare. I found Jake and Elizabeth, but I couldn’t find Isaac. Anxiety washed over me, just like in the worst nightmares.”

He was holding back tears, his voice quivering now and again as he spoke.

“I finally found him, in a closet and they’d cut his head off. I don’t know how they did it, but then I started running after them. I spent what seemed like less time running through the corridors, shouting for them and calling them out. I seemed to know their names in the dream.”

“What happened then?”

“I found them. They were talking to a group of kids, punk rockers it looked like. Dread filled me again when I thought they might have talked these punk rockers into killing me to protect them. But they backed up and, with tears in my eyes, I shouted, ‘They fucking cut an eight-year-olds head off!’ and they started back pedaling. ‘It was for the good of the ship,’ one of them said. ‘He would have killed us all, we had to do it,’ the other one said. They kept walking backwards, holding their hands up like they were innocent. The punks all looked at each other, and then they looked at me. I screamed and the whole group of punks helped me jump them. I just remember punching and kicking, crying the whole time because I kept thinking about that poor little boy with his head off.”

“That must have been when you woke me up.”

A single tear dripped out of each of his eyes and he looked away. “I woke up trying to find Jake to just hold him… I just couldn’t find him and I started to think it was his head they cut off...”

She stood up, came across the table and pulled his head into her chest and held him. “Sssshhhh. It’s okay, baby. Everything’s okay.”

“I know. I know.” But he still kept crying.