THE DREAM
The blouse comes first, whispering as she moves. The scarf attached at its collar swings like a pendulum from Grandma’s neck. I can see her eyes, bright islands in a stormy face. So wild they make the air around her hum. I know that look.
I am its target.
Her long cold fingers find my arm. The world tilts as she drags me toward the basement. The smell of soup and bleach linger as we move through the kitchen to the door. My cries are small and stuttering, but she frowns as if the noise offends her. The motion stops. She exhaled a long sharp sigh through her nose and the door screeched open.
The basement breathes out; cool, damp, full of concrete dust and something metallic. The darkness clings to the step fighting for space with the light. A living thing in wait for what it’s being gifted. She half-carries , half-drops me down to the middle of the staircase. The back of my legs harshly meeting wood.
She retreats and the smell of her perfume, heavy with lilac follows her upward. The door shudders shut. I don’t move.
My legs shift against the wood. The small squeaky cry belts out of me louder, shaking the air. My throat burns. My breathing becomes hiccups through ragged puffs. The tears eventually dry sticky on my face.
Between my feet the steps have narrow gaps. The dark beneath shifts when I look too long as if something waits there, stretching, curling upwards. I tucked my feet close, hands balled under my chin. When my eyes start to adjust I notice the jars, gray shapes glinting between the unfinished walls. Peaches and beans and something cloudy floating behind old glass. All of it still, all of it watching.
I’m not afraid of the basement, not really. The dark feels quiet, almost kind compared to the muffled sounds on the other side of the door. It’s that space on the other side of the door that hurts the most. The sunlight I can’t see, the footsteps I can’t read. Up there is where the real danger lives.
The silence builds until the sound of my own heartbeat fills the stairwell. The beat feels like home. But then, without warning, the door bursts open, light spilling like a shout. Arms lift me fast, pressing me against a chest that’s shaking, maybe in anger, maybe in fear. I bury my face into their skin that smells of soap and sweat. Someone is yelling, not at me this time, but the noise still burns my ears.
THE REALITY OF THE DREAMS
It was late when I told her. The house was dim except for the lamp on the end table bleeding amber across the couch. My Aunt listened in stillness. She had always felt like warmth woven into human shape. The kind of person whose silence carried more safety than anyone else’s words.
The dream had been coming for months, although it did not feel like a dream at all. Each time it began the same way with the white blouse then basement steps and the heaviness of waiting. I told her everything; the smells, the door shutting, how I could still hear my own breath hiccuping in the dark.
When I finished, the room was still enough to hear the clock ticking. My Aunt’s eyes glistened before I even realized she’d started crying. She set the cup she was holding down carefully, as if any sudden motion might shatter something invisible between us.
“I’m so sorry, I don’t know how you remember that. You were so little.”
Her voice was the sound of something fragile breaking. I stared at her, waiting for her to say the thing that would make the dream resolve. Maybe there was something different from my dream and reality. When she didn’t, I realized I was crying. My throat caught dry and aching.
“It’s true?” I asked, barely able to form the words.
She nodded once.
When she spoke, her voice was smaller than I had ever heard it. “I came home early that day from work. Found you on the stairs, half asleep from crying. That same little dress you described. She said you wouldn’t stop crying, so she…needed to calm you down.” The words faltered beneath her breath. “I never got more than that.”
I felt the room spin slow as syrup, the sound of the clock grew louder.
When I asked my mother later, she didn’t cry. She wrung her hands keeping her eyes on some distant point just left of mine. She told me of another time She had caught Grandma by the lake’s edge behind the house. She was holding a cookie as bait luring me towards the water. She said I was barely old enough to walk. She said it was her who decided Grandma wouldn’t watch us anymore. She looked almost proud of the memory, as if remembering to intervene once could balance the rest.
The questions that lingered like smoke in my thoughts: locking a toddler in the dark wasn’t enough, or the end result of me possibly drowning in the lake?
The thought twisted in me.
Maybe that is why the dark never frightened me. The dark had never shut the door. It only waited, quiet and indifferent. It held me when people would not.
As a child I had sat in closets, in corners, behind curtains, under covers,any quiet place between breaths. The dark is warm hands, muted sound, even mercy. The danger was always on the other side of the dark.
In the silence, the truth settles like dust: I’d never been afraid of the dark. I’d only ever been afraid of what the light revealed. The people waiting on the other side of the door pretending not to see.
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