DREAMS AND DAYS
Word Count: 466
There is a little boy who goes to sleep scared every night. He has heard that dreams can become real. He is afraid that the monsters in his dreams, the one that flies with black bat wings the span of his house, and the one that’s faster than a cheetah but looks like a dinosaur and has teeth the length of the little boy himself, will someday find him in his bedroom even though his mother makes him keep the door closed now.
The monsters change according to what stories his mother tells him as he settles into bed. She smells like apricots and her voice is like nectar blanketing over him. She doesn’t read from books, she makes them up herself. She doesn’t tell him stories about evil beings and scary things; she tells him stories of pebbled brooks and fields of waving grass and treasures hiding in the places no one looks to find them. She is soft and warm and he thinks she is beautiful. She doesn’t know that he sees monsters in between her words.
If he were older, maybe by just a year or two–he’s only six–he might have realized the monsters started coming when his daddy went away. At first he even thought it was his dad come home, a silhouette tall and dark within the slit of light back when his mother left his bedroom door open just that little bit. He remembered calling out, “Daddy!” but the door would close and whatever had been there would blend into the night-black room.
After a while, the monsters changed in shape and form. He heard their booming voices through the walls. That’s what usually woke him up and if he cried out, the dreams he’d dragged into awakening would stop making noise and go away.
The little boy accepted fear of sleeping and then the fear of waking and finding all his dreams still there. He worried less and less about it as his world got bigger every day. So much to see, so much to dream about–good things that kept the monsters away. Soon he didn’t even think about them anymore.
Then one day his mother introduced him to a man with gleaming teeth and a pot belly that overhung his pants and with his skinny legs he appeared to be a bird. The man reached out and took the boy’s hand and shook it and said how he had always wanted a son. The man’s hand was cold and hard. His eyes were dark and piggy. The boy pulled his hand away, wanting desperately to speak, to say something that would make this newest monster go back into the dreams, disappear back into the darkness where the boy was sure he’d come from.
