Dream Sequence Deirdre Danklin
In my dream life, I walk up a moss-covered spiral staircase to the top of
an opalescent tower. I'm a princess in my dream life, there's a white owl
with a flat face perched on my shoulder who coos cliches in my ear. Shoot
for the moon, the owl says, even if you miss you'll land among
the stars. In my real life, there are glow-in-the-dark stars
attached to my ceiling fan and a spider stuck weaving a web between the
glass of my bedroom window and its screen. I go to school, and I'm not a
princess. I have a dog that my family found skinny, starving, tied to a
tree. Nothing flies. In my dream life, I catch my teeth in a bloody pile
in my hands, and that's how I know something is coming to invade my
kingdom. I'm not a princess but a king. So, I wear a crown made of bloody
teeth and ride a white owl to the battlefield. There, I fight the falling
debris of exploded stars. I win. In my real life, I grow up. I wear a
school uniform that makes me look like Lucy from Peanuts. I make a few
good friends, but we grow apart. In my dream life, they call me the
toothless king, a destroyer and creator. There is peace in the gardens of
my kingdom, and pink roses with blue eyeballs at their centers unfold and
make the world smell like freshly cracked pistachios. In my real life, I
go to a small college in Pennsylvania and every single one of my new
friends gets drunk and wakes up with a boy's fingers inside them, or a
boy's body on top of them. Twice, I carry a smaller girl home while she
cries. In my dream life, a gray mist creeps over my kingdom. I grow a
mouth full of baby teeth that scream when it rains. I banish
slippery-smiled people from my kingdom, the ones who throw parties and
tell me I'm pretty. I tell them to wrap their belongings onto their backs,
tie them up with a linen sack, and leave, go, be gone. I sit alone in my
opalescent tower and the gray mist shuts all of the flower eyes. In my
real life, I get a grant from the French department to study abroad. I eat
lavender-flavored gelato and watch jugglers on unicycles maneuver ancient
alleyways. I'm old enough to drink in the south of France, so my new
friends and I buy cheap wine that tastes like vinegar and dance sur le
pont d'Avignon. In my dream life, the mist trembles a little, and I
can see flashes of color behind it. The remaining inhabitants of my
kingdom, the talking animals and plant poets, say there is a possibility
that the gray days may be lifting. They talk about me, shut up in my
tower, like an ancient evil. My white owl tries to preen me, but I don't
have any feathers. In my real life, I go to Myrtle Beach and I lose track
of a friend at a party. In the morning, I get a call from the local jail.
They lead her out in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. A boy ripped her
clothes off on the beach and she ran away naked and the cops threw her in
jail for being indecent. In my dream life, the lightning comes. It
irradiates the mist and kills the green grass and turns the toads reciting
Shakespeare to stone. The lightning strikes the tower over and over again,
and all of my baby teeth scream. In my real life, I meet the man I'll
marry at a party, I move to Berlin, I move back, I get married, I work
long hard jobs that don't require me to use my brain. I get called sweetie
and sunshine and bitch by various bosses and people who
call the office on the phone. In my dream life, the earth is scorched, but
all of my screaming baby teeth have fallen out. I add them to my crown,
which drips with blood. There are words banging on the doors of my opal
tower, begging admittance to my abandoned kingdom, so I let them in.
Vowels who aren't afraid of me, but sing loud low tunes of mourning and
love. Consonants that chuckle and skip all around me. I smile a gummy
smile. In my real life, my husband and I move from the worst
apartment in the world to a better apartment, and I get into grad school.
My boss gives me a nice purse as a parting gift. Our new apartment is
overrun with mice, so we adopt a cat. In my dream life, the vowels and
consonants weave themselves together in a pattern that becomes people.
Characters, they tell me, and I will write about them. I feel a new set of
teeth, big and strong, like a horse's teeth, grow in. I smile a fat white
smile and order the revived toads to fetch me a pen. We float up to the
top of my ancient tower until our heads brush up against the
bioluminescent mushrooms that sprout from the roof, glowing pink and green
and blue. I write my name on the toads' skin and they shiver with
happiness. In my real life, my cat purrs, my husband makes me pancakes,
and there is sunshine coming through our bay window in the mornings. In
grad school, my professors tell me not to write about dreams.
Deirdre Danklin has had flash fictions in Hobart, The Nashville Review, Tiny Molecules and
others. She lives in Baltimore.
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