The Sound of Sleep

Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash

The sound of sleep
Descends without a peep
With a flock of curly sheep
In bounds and leaps
Where the baby lies
Devoid of desperate cries
In a perfect dormant heap







Written for dVerse

Out of Reach

Photo by Md Mahdi on Unsplash

Dawn swung the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer, somehow still amazed at it all. Here she was, somewhere in her forties (probably), but only able to remember the last twenty-six years. Most days she still felt like a teenager. What she imagined a teenager felt like, anyways. Everything before twenty (probably) was a resounding blank.

But despite that, she was married, running a household, and raising teenagers (who arguably knew more about the world than she did). How had that happened? She pushed the wet clothes firmly into the dryer and patted the machine. It still seemed magical and unknowable to her.

Vanessa stomped in and dumped clothes on the floor, “How come Darcy gets to sleep?”

“He’ll do his laundry later,” Dawn said automatically. “The washer will be stuffed as it is.”

Vanessa grumbled as she sorted her clothes into different piles. She did not think her brother’s date to the high school dance was a good enough excuse to stay up late and get out of chores. Dawn had given up explaining that Darcy had done most of his chores during the week and would be finishing the rest later. She wondered if she’d been this crabby as a teenager. Had she even had a brother to argue with over petty issues? She pushed the thought away. It didn’t do her any good to chase questions she couldn’t answer.

Vanessa finished and headed back to her room. Listening to her footsteps, Dawn let out a sigh. She’d give anything to remember her past life. The footsteps came to a sudden stop.

“Mom?” Vanessa’s voice had lost the grumpiness and sounded small.

“What is it sweetie?”

“How do you know if you’re hallucinating?”

Teenagers ask weird questions and Dawn had thought she was done being surprised by the things they came up with. Apparently she’d been wrong. “Hallucinating? What?” She asked as she followed Vanessa into the living room. She stopped and stared and wondered if she was hallucinating. Darcy had been napping on the couch, and he was still sleeping, but now he was floating about six inches above the couch with strange golden designs hovering about him.

“We’re seeing the same thing?” squeaked Vanessa. “Like he’s floating in a hamster ball.”

“Yes…” said Dawn faintly. There was something familiar about the designs. Something like a memory danced just out of reach. They both stared, mesmerized, hardly daring to breathe, as if a sudden sound or movement would send Darcy flying away. (Impossible, something inside her whispered. It would take conscious effort to get him to fly and he wasn’t exerting any.) The golden designs shifted and tilted in intricate swirls. She couldn’t take her eyes off them. They twisted one way then the other, seemingly at random and yet… “Look, there’s a pattern,” she murmured and reached out.

“Mom!” gasped Vanessa, clearly worried. “What if you hurt him?”

But she wouldn’t. This, whatever this was, she knew it. There was a pattern in the twists and turns, and with a brush of her fingers she sent the pattern spinning in a different direction. For a moment, a new pattern formed, then the golden swirls dissipated. Darcy plopped back onto the couch.

“Ow!” he sat up, rubbing his head and then caught sight of his mom and sister. Vanessa stared at him opened mouthed. Dawn stood with her hand still outstretched. “Um, guys, what’s going on?”

Vanessa opened and closed her mouth several times, but couldn’t answer.

“Mom?” Darcy looked worried. “What happened?”

Dawn stared at her hand. For just a moment, when she touched the golden designs, her world had been clear and right. No unanswered questions. She’d understood everything. All that was lost now. “There’s something I’ve forgotten,” she whispered in bewilderment.

Blank Slate

Photo by Charlie Harutaka on Unsplash

If you could start over with a blank slate, what would you do?

Dawn shudders at the essay prompt as it beams down from the blackboard. The other college students babble incessantly, spinning imagined lives into being; filling the air with chaos and drowning her in mindless speculation. She hurries from the room before the professor officially dismisses them, gulping for breath. Outside she can breathe again, but her only thought is a vision of herself, forcibly erasing the prompt from the blackboard. How can she write such an essay? Eight years ago I woke up to a wretched existence in a hospital bed as a blank slate.

Waking in a strange room with machines she didn’t have names for and questions she couldn’t answer was bewildering. Fate had left her unconscious, floating in a battered sailboat, with no clues to the mystery that was herself. No parents came forward with relieved tears to claim her. No worried friends appeared to connect her with her past. No memories resurfaced to solve the mystery of herself. There was only the nurses, the doctors, the social workers, to put herself back together again. Never once in eight years has anything seemed familiar.

Sometimes she thinks her favorite dream is a memory. If only it was! If only she had just one memory. But this one is just a dream. In the twilight, she walks down a worn path with her father to a small wooden sailboat. Look, she says to him, I can sail to the end of the river and back. She doesn’t know how old she is in the dream. Young though; maybe a teenager, eager to show off her skill. Her father is just as eager to be shown. His smile grows with every step. It almost could be a memory. The feel of her father’s hand in hers; the sparkle of stars in the water; the gentle caress of the night breeze. It all feels real. But it’s not. Because when they enter the sailboat, she holds up her hands and golden light spills out in intricate patterns and that is how she guides the boat through the water. They sail at impossible speeds, passing slower vessels, passing cities, all the way down to the mouth of the river. There they turn around, laughing with delight. In the east, the sun rises and the dream ends.
If she could will herself into the world of her dream, she would. In that world her slate is all filled up, except for a little bit at the end, still waiting to be written. But reality is all around her as she walks through the buildings of the community college where she’s trying to cobble together something that looks like a life. She takes a bus to her next class: sailing. Her breath catches at the river. It makes her heart ache even more for the dream of what never was. This sailboat is fiberglass and modern, not weathered wood. The ropes (lines, the instructor said) are awkward in her hands. But something about it feels right.

I named myself, Dawn, she writes, after a memory that never happened, in the hope that someday, my slate will be filled.

 *

In fantasy, there's often a character who has amnesia who's trying to figure out who they are. Sometimes they're even stuck on earth, even though they're from a magical world. I've always wondered how would this character handle being told magic isn't real? Assuming they can still talk, they know the meaning of words and would know the word magic meant, but since they can't remember anything, would they remember that magic is real, while seeing all evidence to the contrary? Obviously, this question will never be answered. But it did lead to some interesting backstory for Dawn, who will eventually have a grand adventure to get her memories back.