Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
I’ve been thinking about someone else’s dreams. It started almost a decade ago, one spring morning when Mom said, “I had a nightmare. About you, and ghosts.” I was sixteen, so I’d long outgrown those beliefs even though she still held them. At the end of a horror movie, when the lights came on and the credits rolled, I let go of fear like a physical release, like the sheets gripped and then dropped when awoken.
But Mom continued, “You sang with them on the beach. Your eyes were closed and you laced your fingers through a ghost’s fingers, somehow, and you opened your mouth and out came this haunting melody. It was terrifying—beautiful, of course, but really unnerving. I cried and cried for you to stop, but your eyes stayed shut and you backed into and under the waves. Then I woke up.”
It was exactly like her to turn me into some mythological eerie spirit in her sleep and to tell me about it casually over coffee before she drove me, late, to school. “Interesting,” I said, “so what would Freud say about this? Something sexy?” She threw her head back and laughed, stark and pretty, like a bird call.
“It wasn’t all sex for him. I believe he’d say it’s just a pathway to something greater.” I rolled my eyes. Poured my milky coffee down the sink and tugged on Mom’s silk scarf.
“Maybe I’ll learn all about it if I ever get to first period.” She conceded, swept her eclectic collection of keychains up from the counter, and followed me out the door. We stopped talking about her ghostly nightmare and pretended to stop thinking about it. But I stayed a little afraid of that dream version of myself.
When she tells me, nine years later, that last night she dreamt of my death, my brutal callous murder at the hands of someone we both love, I can only be scared, but not surprised.
“Asha, your father is dying,” Mom says on a snowy Monday over the phone. I’m scrambling to find my house keys so her voice is clamped haphazardly between my ear and shoulder. “It won’t be long.”
“Mmm, what is it this time?” I hear her click her tongue and can picture her, long braids clipped with gold swaying as she shakes her head at my indifference. Crow’s feet creased in her otherwise smooth, brown skin.
“Did you even hear what I said? Your father. Approaching death. Death, approaching.”
“Yes, Mom, got it. I’m running late, can you get to the point or call me later?” She glares, I assume. “Was it WebMD or a feeling in your bones?”
“How about a doctor’s visit?” In the living room, I lift a jacket from the center of the Papasan chair and find my keys underneath. “How’s that, Asha?”
“The doctor said that he’s dying?” I lock the door with a slam and turn to the bright white before me. The gelid air almost freezes my lungs as I inhale. And Mom’s words begin to eat at my morning tranquility.
“He went in for a cough. Those lungs, you know. And they x-rayed and found something.”
“Found what?”
“Well, a mass. It was mysterious, they said.”
“Inconclusive,” I corrected. “So he might not be dying.”
“But he might be!” I roll my eyes, but I feel myself itching to chew at a cuticle, a bad habit that reveals itself when anxiety creeps into my body, all the way down to the fingertips.
“Keep me updated.” The L is a block away. I’ll lose her as soon as I am enveloped by the swarm of noisy people.
“I will, Asha. I always do.” This was true. She’d call again by tomorrow, even though the MRI or whatever follow-up likely won’t have taken place. “One other thing! I almost forgot. Last night I dreamt that Simon,” her mouth is full of affection as she says my husband’s name, “tried to kill you. Quite disturbing.”
“Christ, Mom. Bleak. Goodbye,” but she has already dropped the call without a proper farewell.
At work, I sneak peeks at my cellphone under my desk. I have my own office in a tall building in the Loop and all the authority needed, as executive marketing director for Lake Side Resorts, to pull my phone out and scroll through texts from Simon without flinching when someone walks by.
I could kick my feet up on my desk. The blinds in my window are down, so I could unbutton my shirt and send Simon a photo of the shallow valley supported by lilac lace that I call cleavage if I wanted to. He’d like that. But I’m too young for this job and new to the personal office so I still feel shy as I open the iMessage app when I should be answering emails and brainstorming promotional slogans.
In his text, Simon asks how my day has been. “Dull. But Mom called. Guess what she told me?” I type out quickly in response. I consider the bombshell about Dad. Better said in person, plus I still refuse to worry. When he replies, “What?” I say “She had a dream about you! You murdered me.” It looks even worse in writing. I send it and put my phone away for a while.
“Haha, classic Dorthea. She figured out my plan!” Devil emoji. I roll my eyes but send hearts back. I never take the risqué picture, deciding for some reason that he doesn’t deserve it.
I never remember my own dreams. Mom thinks it’s sad. She’d once read something that said people who dream vividly are more creative. She uses this uncorroborated fact to bolster her self-esteem as an artist—that’s what she calls it, the sculptures she crafts out of lost and found things, trash, food from the compost bin. Art. She uses this fact to hold something over me or throw something in my face. She is at least considerate enough to broach the topic only sideways, never directly.
“Why marketing?” Two years ago, when I accepted the initial entry-level job at Lake Side Resorts. A leading question. “What happened to art?”
“It’s sort of art, in a way.” She cocked her head to the side, raised her sparse eyebrows, come on, Asha. “I got the degree in communications, anyway. And music was never gonna work.” I choked out the confession, she inwardly sighed. Satisfied. Triumphant. Silent, nodding, swallowing something like a smile.
After a long day, after a long period of mutual silence as we sit side by side, scrolling through our phones, Simon pokes my cheek with his finger and I turn my face to bite it—not hard. Like a kiss. And then it is a kiss, his pink-brown mouth on my nose and my own fingers and my lips tongue teeth. We laugh and kiss and fall between the sheets and fuck until we’re hurting each other, my nails in his back, his body too heavy against me, and then keep going.
“Happy anniversary,” he says as we rest, breathless, entwined atop the sweaty sheets.
“Our anniversary was last month.” My eyebrow furrows and my swollen lips crease into a faux scowl. I know he knows. The wilted red tulips are pressed between the pages of a book, the sapphire earrings are currently tangled in my hair, and he wore the jacket I gave him yesterday.
“Well, today feels like another one.” I laugh; he traces my smile with his calloused fingers.
“That good?” I ask.
“Always that good. Every time, Asha, is a celebration.” He bites my shoulder and nuzzles his head into my neck as I gag and retch at his corniness. Four years of this, four years and one month, he has never waned in his affection and utterly Simon-like sweetness. Sometimes saccharine. I eat it up.
In the shower, he traces soap suds along the ridges of my shoulders and back. He kisses my wet black hair, like a lip print in ink. I wash his afro—he hunches over a bit for me to reach—then I run my fingers down the rest of his body. I get on my knees even though the tile is hard and will leave indents in my skin. Again? He asks with his eager eyes, burrowing into me, loving me. I watch his fingernails slip against the walls of the shower as he tries to find something to hold onto, besides my hair, in the other hand. Afterward, pressed against Simon’s ribs in bed, I fall asleep, and I don’t dream of anything.
“When my mom called yesterday,” I say over breakfast, “she told me something concerning. Besides the dream thing.” Simon finishes buttoning his crisp, white shirt at the cuffs and then clears my plate. Empty, except for a stray blueberry that didn’t make it into one of the pancakes that were ready for me when I padded into the cold kitchen half awake.
“Not entirely shocking,” he says. “What was it this time?”
“That’s what I said. But I guess Dad went in for a chest x-ray, and it doesn’t look great.” Simon puts orange juice back into the fridge. He wipes up powdered sugar with a paper towel. Even though his eyes are focused on me, the rest of him appears to be focused on getting out the door.
“Oh. Asha, I’m sorry. Do they think it’s—”
“They don’t know what it is, not yet. I think he has to go in for a follow-up exam. I’m not sure, Mom didn’t tell me much.” He laughs, almost like a scoff. Which feels inappropriate given what I’ve told him. I cross my arms and clench my fingernails into my palms. He is still moving toward the door.
“How very Dorothea. To only drop enough information for shock value.”
“What the fuck does that mean, Simon?” He wasn’t expecting that. I see it in the way he pauses in the middle of pulling his jacket on. The way his jaw clenches, a ripple in his cheek.
“I just mean your mother presents things in a certain way. You know that.” I do. “Don’t start this right now, I’m late to work.”
“You slept in and then wanted to make a big deal over breakfast like it was our fucking anniversary. Not my fault. And now you’re shitting on my mother right after I told you my dad’s health might be in fucking jeopardy. So who, exactly, is starting shit?” Simon’s face now does not belong to the same person who looked at me last night, when we were giddy and in love. I glare back. We both simmer in silence for a moment.
“I don’t know why you feel the need to use that fucking language. All the fucking cussing, like you don’t know how to have a fucking conversation without it. You sound nasty.”
“You sound like an asshole. You sound like you don’t give a shit about what I’m telling you.” My voice surges in amplitude. I try not to go shrill.
“I do! Of course I care about your dad’s health. We can talk more about it.”
“You literally could not wait to walk out the door.”
“We can talk more about it. After work.” The office calls. He will go crunch numbers and maybe he will vent about what a bitch I am over coffee in the break room. He will come home with flowers and big brown eyes wide with remorse and forgiveness.
“Fine.” Fuck you. I choke that one back. “See you after work.” For a second I don’t know if he’ll walk over and kiss me or if he’ll cuss me out so we’re even. He shakes his head contemptuously and buttons up his jacket.
“You’re something, Asha.” He can’t say “crazy” or “fucking insane” or “a psycho bitch” because we’ve had fights about that. The door only barely slams as he leaves.
There is all too familiar ease with which we oscillate from a sweet blueberry pancake morning to spitting bitterness across the kitchen at each other, the glint of anger bringing hot tears to the edges of my eyes and reflected in his. I refuse the comparison that itches my brain; insistent, irritating, painful in the way that mixes with a peculiar bit of pleasure if I scratch. We are not my parents. Our hands don’t touch each other, we don’t draw blood.
“Last night I dreamt that Simon hurt you.” She doesn’t even say hello or wait for me to say it. Her voice is as low and warm and as easy as ever, the sound of real maple syrup. “Again, Asha, it was a really violent fight. He looked so full of rage. Isn’t that weird?” Weird. What’s weird is that my mother seems, for once, totally willing to let a dream be just that: a dream. I personally begin to wonder what path to greatness my husband’s mariticide could provide.
“Can you please stop telling me these things? It’s creeping me out.” It’s been a week since the last nightmare. I wonder if maybe Dad’s been violent lately. If it’s about her more than it is about me. But maybe he’s gotten weak if he’s sick; she could take him with a hot skillet or even a broomstick, probably, so it’s conceivable that they’ve drawn up some kind of truce.
“Oh, Asha. Simon wouldn’t. But maybe it’s— are you… having problems?”
“Nope.” We fight. I say crueler things to Simon than I would to anyone else. I did last month, last week, last night. But he is also the person I love the most, and this is just how marriage is.
Simon makes the decision that we should go to East Chicago for Christmas. I resist but he plays dirty: “Your dad, Asha. She said that he’s dying. You said it yourself, remember?” I remember, despite easy work distractions, easy Simon distractions, despite trying not to. I’ve received follow-up calls from Mom, but none regarding Dad’s lungs. Maybe he hasn’t gone back to the doctor.
Maybe everything is fine. Maybe it was all a lie, a ploy conceived by Dorthea Davis. I narrow my eyes at Simon, whose head is tilted in the familiar manner of condescension, who scratches at his beard like he’s a fucking Rodin sculpture.
“Are you in on it? Is this a trap?”
“That is a very fucked up thing to imply about your mother. And me.”
“I know.” I consider the odds of me winning the argument. The odds of one or both of us yelling or crying. I decide I’m too tired. “Fine, to Indiana. But back here before New Years. Well before New Years.” He chuckles with a hint of something sour.
For reasons I don’t understand, Simon is fond of East Chicago. To me, my parents’ neighborhood is a cold, industrial strip of land inhabited by gas stations and car dealerships, and elderly people in nursing homes. Smokestacks and steel mills pollute the backdrop. He says it feels comfortable there, he can relax away from the city. His own family is too far down south to access their summer kickbacks scored with good music and their easy laughter and their soul food. So we go to mine.
I love the parts he loves, but he ignores the parts I hate. Intermittent violence does something that even the chronic kind can’t achieve. It haunts the rooms with plastic-wrapped furniture, laughs at the gold-rimmed paintings of angels and deities that line the walls, but only shows its face sometimes, once you’ve forgiven and forgotten.
So the vacation days Simon and I hoarded until the end of the year will be wasted on a trip home. Maybe when we get back to Chicago after Christmas, Simon will surprise me with tickets to Cancun or Hawaii. That was last year’s anniversary present, though. And we haven’t been smiling at each other the same.
Dad got the follow-up CT scan. It’s the first thing Mom tells me upon squeezing Simon and me into a hug and closing the door to the house behind us. It does appear to be some kind of ambush; although it’s Christmas Eve, none of my aunties or cousins, none of Mom’s art friends or church friends are here. Just Dad, in his old recliner, chewing on a toothpick since he can’t suck on a cigarette. He waves as she tells us they won’t know the extent of his lung trouble until the biopsy. “Asha, baby, Dorthea here has got the doctor’s saying I can’t smoke. You bring your old man some smokes for Christmas?”
“Yeah, Dad, right here!” I pull out a pack of black licorice, just for him, and toss it over. He catches it not-so-swiftly, not like he used to.
He lets out a disappointed whistle but chuckles, a glint of amusement in his deep black eyes. “That’ll do.” The four of us do the perfunctory hugs and kisses and settle into the creaking bones of my childhood home.
Another dream, she tells me. We’re sitting on the couch in the living room. The entertainment center holds a new flat-screen TV and Mom-made sculptures I don’t recognize, but much else is the same. The sofa is a warm brown pattern I’ve never noticed, because she has finally taken the plastic covers off, for the first time in my life. No more concern that the fabric will hold the stale dirty smell of tobacco. “This is the third one. Should I be concerned?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.” She doesn’t look concerned. Simon couldn’t hurt a fly, even if she watched him do it. His brown sugar eyes could charm a mom like no other.
“I’m dreaming it for a reason, Asha. His hands around your throat.” Mom has had hands around her throat. Those dark tree knot knuckles smothering her soft breath and tears slipping beneath Dad’s fingernails. Not often. But she knows when a man will or won’t go there. I shake my head, begin to part my lips to speak.
“Simon won’t,” she cuts off, reassuring. As if it needs to be discussed and confirmed, again. I nod, every time, and roll my eyes into my skull.
“Of course not.” I look over at him, my dream guy in the flesh. He smooths the bumps in the cashmere sweater over my maybe-dying father’s shoulder to make sure the man looks right for Christmas dinner. He looks up, right as I’m watching and grins and winks, having caught me in the act of ogling. Of course not.
But. I argue in my head, later, as I stir the cranberry sauce with the wooden spoon that he has gently nudged into my hand: here, hold this. He needs to tend the macaroni that’s boiling over. “Asha,” Simon says, not aggressive. But not tender. I snap out of the haze.
“Sorry,” I say, “just daydreaming.” His face softens into a smile with a tilted head. Like, silly Asha. Sweet Asha, just dreaming. About his hands around my throat.
I stand next to Dad by the old piano, a brown upright Yamaha with cracked paint and keys that fall out of tune the moment you pressed down on a chord. Simon plays Silent Night, a song I’ve always loved. Mom feels the opposite; especially since the notes ring out with dissonance, there is an eerie quality that she says reminds her of ghosts.
Dad surprises me when I feel him clasp my hand in his. I notice, at this moment, that his dark skin has taken on a pallor, not all at once but I guess over the course of the last few months, maybe years. I just missed it happening. The skin of his hand is rough and dry, but I squeeze back. Force myself to.
We sing along to the Christmas song. I’ve inherited strong vocal cords from my father, so we don’t sound half bad. I watch Simon’s agile fingers glide over the keys, think of the other things those fingers can do. Good and bad.
Mom enters the room holding a glass of crimson wine and her other hand resting in the place between her throat and chest. Her plum lips are parted in a way that goes from pleased, sentimental, look at all my babies together, to startled, like a cold spirit has entered the room.
“This reminds me,” she gasps, “of a dream I once had.” Simon groans, slams down on the keys in exaggerated vexation. I feel something stirring in my own memory. Dad laughs, low and rough, like gravel.
“Dorthea, cut that out. Can’t a moment just be a moment, not about you?”
“No, no, it’s just something about this image. The way you look, and sound. Beautiful, of course, but… sort of unnerving.” She tilts her head, takes a sip of merlot. “Not sure, just reminds me.”
So I’m left to wonder. Simon holds my hand beneath the dinner table. Mom passes the dressing, Dad carves the ham. Warm, real smiles, glowing. Meanwhile, I wonder if what Mom just saw was the ghost dad has become, or will, and there I was, holding his hand, singing something she’d call a haunting melody. No beach this time, but maybe when dreams came true little things could be different.
Left to wonder what would be different and what would be recognizable, if her dream about Simon comes true.