I see him in my Dreams

“This way?”

“No, go a bit lower. Try to follow through with your arms, see?”

The bowling ball was heavy. Heavier than any I’d remembered holding on to for the last three years. His arms steadied mine, and that smell of laundry left to dry in the sun came back to me. An older brother’s support – Peter’s.

Slowly, he lets go of the thing and allows me to try shooting for the pins. Gutter ball.

“You’re stupid!” A light smack followed the words to the back of my head.

Then came the lines from a script, worn and creased at its edges, “See you do any better.”

Spare.

“Eh- it’s not bad, isn’t it? Pretty good, I’d say.”

He was fourteen. I was ten. He towered over me then, his look hard to read where I stood, but his hands that rubbed at the back of his head betrayed his embarrassment.

Peter's hands were wedged in his shoes, trying to take them off. Here, the soreness in my heart became impossible to ignore. Yes, the walk home came next. The end of the dream. Except, I didn’t want it to end just yet.

Legs that felt like brittle plaster carried me to Peter. I must have seemed so awkward, trying to lean against him, my arms over his left shoulder, “Yo. I’m hungry. Let’s get some lunch first.”

“Nah. Mom’s cooking. Don’t feel like doing much else today, either.”

Already, like droplets of water that bled into watercolour, his face was becoming hazy.

“I-I, yeah, then… maybe we could just go to the bookstore. I need to bu-”

“We don’t have to. I’ll just give you some of my stuff when we get back home.”

I was sure he’d never said those words in that exact order ever before. And then I opened my eyes to a dark room, the door closed, the flickering lights of the television from the living room seeping through under it. And in the background, I could hear the too-loud snoring from dad, who must have blacked out on his recliner again, the television on some insurance advertisement.

My room, his room before, was a mess. The bedsheets I lay on were messy and untucked. Laid strewn all over the linoleum flooring were the books from school that I kept messied to give the impression of keeping busy to anyone who entered. Till that day, however, I kept just one part of his old room clean and tidy. It was in an old origami paper box within the cupboards. Only I knew where it was.

My phone buzzed. The lock screen of a timetable showing me that time.

My voice was gravel, “One forty…”

It was a Wednesday too. I contemplated going back to sleep while my arms reached for the old ratty brick of a smartphone on my bedside drawer. There, below the time, was the message some friend of mine had sent, asking if I was still ‘Down to go for the concert this Friday?’

I placed the phone back down. I hadn't bought a ticket of course. But it would be easy to simply make up an excuse on Friday when the time came.

I fumbled for the charger. My hand slipped, and I lurched forwards, tumbling out of bed. My head cracked against the drawer, my body against the floor. The sound was monstrous. And already, I could hear a pig-like stirring, clogged-sinus grunting from the man that slumbered in the living room.

“Jessie! Uh… That you?!”

I didn’t move. At best, the only thing that could come from this was an awkward talk with my dad. Something about school. Something about just being aware of the people I surround myself with.

It took him a good minute, but the bear of a man got to the doorway. And when he rapped on the wood, he did so with an uneven rhythm. Three knocks. The last kept the crickets outside waiting.

“Are you sleeping?! Sleeping,” he repeated that last word again. He’d realised that he spoke too loudly, intending to correct himself after the fact.

My phone, now on the floor, buzzes again. Another notification that I don’t plan to read. Its brightness turned all the way up illuminated the contours of the door handle. They shifted, being pulled down. Dad was opening the door. Then he stopped.

Then he spoke, a certain clarity cracking through his late-night malaise.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” a pause, “M-maybe I’ll make dinner, yeah? Peter wouldn't want you cooped up in your room like this.”

The handle remained unmoving. Frozen there.

There was a loud drumming in my ears from my heart. Poison in my throat; Some words I knew that I’d regret saying threatened to spill forth between my lips. Yet they were kept shut.

“I mean… Jesus, Jessie. I haven’t seen you all day, I-”

I heard a snort that was supposed to be a sniffle of sorts before he let go of the door handle.

“There’s pizza… Happy birthday, Jess-”

And then just footsteps. They trailed off somewhere else in the house.

The thin sheet of near-blue fluorescent light from that gap under the door showed any movement that came and went outside my room. I must have lain still on the floor for a good five minutes or so, still staring at it. My arm had begun to numb when I plugged my phone back into the charger.

On my bed now, I reached underneath the mattress and pulled out a journal, too many slips of paper jammed in between its pages. I took the blunt pencil from where I knew it to be, jotting down some notes in the next empty pages of the book. Half-lidded, half-conscious mutterings trailed off under my breath as I uttered the words I scribbled down there, ‘Bowling dream. Tried to change it. Failed.’

I shut the book. Its cover read ‘Dream Journal’ on a cheap green post-it note that was plastered on the front, written in black marker. I shoved it under my bed again.

“The next time I’m dreaming, I’ll realise I’m dreaming.”

The words came, a practised ritual. Deep breaths that lathered lethargy as a thick spread on my muscles came next.

“The next time I’m dreaming, I’ll realise-”

I opened my eyes. I was at the movies, some rerun of some half-remembered superhero flick a few years back.

By instinct, I tried plunging my thumb into my right palm. The skin gave like bruised fruit, the finger morphing into the flesh itself. I was dreaming again. And my hands were smaller this time. I was younger than I had been in my previous dream.

A white glow flickered to my right. Peter was playing a game he used to like. The dream wasn’t ideal, knowing already that all that could come was just an hour of silence, interrupted occasionally by me pointing a finger at the screen when something funny happened. It was fine by most accounts, but 'fine' wasn't quite doing it for me. I wanted more. I needed more.

I eyed the tall cup of soda I knew to be to my right. It was brimming with the dark liquid, sickly sweet. Though I saw it only as something completely different that instant. It was my throughline to take the dream elsewhere. A way to get Peter to leave the cinema and maybe, just maybe, make new memories with him. It was–

Falling, the paper cup that I had hit my hand on toppled, spilling its contents onto Peter’s jeans.

“Fuck me… Carefu-”

Peter’s exclamation was too loud for the crowd then, and he was shushed into sitting back down. No doubt, his subsequent grunt came from more of the icy drink staining the bottom of his pants where he sat. He drew in real close to me, my heart beating at the back of my throat. I felt then like this little kid that had gotten into trouble herself, “I’m going… to the toilet. Help me clean up, won’t you?”

I just nodded vigorously. Though I kept telling myself that it was just a dream, I still felt bad. His irritation felt real, and I was second-guessing the esoteric ethics of pissing off my dead elder brother to spend more time with him in my head. They were all thoughts that faded as I saw the last of him walk out of the theatre.

The ice cubes lay strewn on the floor and seat, though I only picked up the ones that were more obviously visible. I cleaned up quickly, then squeezed through the row of movie-goers to find him. The hallway carpet was a patterned brown I barely remembered. I blinked.

The bag of takeout contained the several packets of chilli that had been missing the past couple of times – the ones that went well with crispy spring rolls. Mom was helping me take out the boxes of jasmine rice, and something felt off. It was a pit in my stomach, though I dismissed it as hunger when my core grumbled as if on cue. This brought on a small laugh from Mom.

“We’ll get to eating, sweetheart. Your brother just needs to finish freshening up in the bathroom, yeah?”

I tried to put a word to her voice. It felt strangely discordant. Fitting, yes, but the cheer that glazed it when she chirped those words felt uncanny. It was too sweet – sickeningly so.

It struck me like a numbing current, that compulsion to check if I was in a dream or not. My hands moved to the space under the table, where the tip of my thumb sank into my palm like moulding plasticine.

I stood up immediately. The sudden movement toppled the chair I sat on backwards, clattering rather loudly.

“Whoa there… You doing okay, Jess?” Dad was definitely younger; his face clean-shaven. “You’re a ghost!”

That pit just grew in my abdomen. I told myself that it was just me getting caught off guard with how I was suddenly at my brother’s fourteenth birthday party, but that hollow feeling there just spread. Spread. Dad placed a steady hand on my shoulder. He continued, the concern heavy-laden in his voice, “You need some fresh a-”

He was interrupted by a flush from the toilet that was too loud.

Something’s wrong.

I tried walking away to the other toilet in the house. They all had locks. I didn’t know why, but I just knew that I did not want to see him then. It just took one step to find that steady hand pulling me back, Dad’s fingers a steel collar.

“What’s wrong there, champ? Take things slow now.”

A door slid open on the second floor, the padded footsteps of socks on tiling deafening where I stood. They were like blocks of concrete being dropped on earth. And the air was too thick. And the pressure off.

Something’s wrong.

I made up my mind – that act of thinking itself a miracle that moment. The dreams ended when something happened that I knew I didn’t expect. They ended when something there didn’t mix well with memory. Half-screaming, “Dad! Say that you think the Mets are washed, and that the Yankees are winning the next series!”

“What?” There was a hint of amusement in his voice. I didn’t care.

“Just say it!”

The footsteps grew faster. An uneven, however hastening gait that came down the stairs like something feral.

“The Mets are washe-”

And I was back in my room. My blanket wrapped around me tightly. I woke up sitting up on my bed panting heavily, fumbling for my glasses to wear.

There was a glass of water on the drawer. I picked it up and leaned against the wardrobe, practically inhaling the water in whole mouthfuls that I forced down my gullet.

A thought hit me to note down everything I’d been through in my dream journal. The one I kept under my mattress. I took the pen, words about everything I needed to say and put on paper, flowing from the ink tip like a dark blue cascade. And then I closed the book shut. It was a night far too eventful for me. And I didn’t think that I’d be trying to lucid dream for a good whi-

It was supposed to be a pencil. Here, a pen in my journal, and yet I knew it to be a pencil that lay between the smushed pages. The hairs on my forearms rose as I lowered myself a safe distance away from my bed. I knew myself well. Knew that I watched too many movies. And I squatted slowly, checking for what might lie under it.

Dark shadows – but were just old clothes and a sweater in reality. I sighed heavy, a great relief washing over me. I needed a game plan for how I’d make it out of this dream without traumatising myself too much. I would get to my dad’s room again and just do the same thing one more time. The idea was so simple. I turned around and there on the top of my closet was my brother, crouching down at an unnatural angle, his eyes bulging from his sockets, trained on my own.

I watched far too many movies.

He lunged at me. I screamed as he drove me into the floor, his weight crushing the breath from my chest. His fingers were ice-cold sausages, overcooked and left to sit in water. They locked around my wrists, stronger than they had any right to be. I couldn’t look at his face. I didn’t need to.

And that was it. There was no way that I could escape from him in a closed room. Not when he had me lying prone on my back. I would get to see what happened when I died in one of these dreams, killed on a cold Spring night. Weather that I knew I would be wearing a sweater in.

I rolled to my right, Peter’s grip on my arm slipping as I began to slide out of my windbreaker. I landed, back hitting the wall hard. Peter was closer to the door, so it was a non-option. And so my hands were already pushing up the wooden base of the windows upwards as ‘Peter’ remained entangled with my hoodie on the floor. I leapt through it onto the tiles of the roof, shutting the window behind me, a hefty slam following it shortly after.

No rest.

A deep compulsion in my core commanded these legs to run, carrying me past the cookie-cutter bungalows in the neighbourhood. They tired quickly until I could make out a thunderous crash a block back. And they were suddenly given a good reason to continue.

The smell – salt, drenched in the early morning cold. It was the smell of the one place I swore to never come back to, though it remained just a short run away from my house. I turned the corner. And there lay a moving desert, its hills and folds zooming away from me, even as I raced towards the horizon – deep lavenders and the rosy hues of the cockcrow painting both sand and water the same dark colours. He died here. Where riptides from the sea took him. The beach.

My feet touched damp sand, forward momentum sending me nearly faceplanting into waist-high water as I began to wade through it, facing the resistance of the waves that crashed into me. Already, I could hear him behind me splashing. And I knew that where I was going was right. Though some part of me told me to turn back, even if it meant facing ‘Peter’, because it didn’t want me facing what happened to him all those years back.

And then I was swimming, the waters too deep for my feet to touch the bottom already. I was no good at swimming. It was why I wasn’t all that surprised when I felt his cold hands grab my ankle, pulling me underwater. I saw his face. It was what I wished I had made up in my head, but it was, as it had been when rescuers pulled him out from the black waters three years back. Teal. Not even decayed, just missing something behind his eyes.

The water numbed the edges of my fingers, the waves forcefully pushing us back and forth. Peter’s hands were shackles clamped right around my neck, threatening to dent my windpipe and pop my head with pressure.

It was now far too late to try anything else. Water had broken through my lips, brine filling my lungs as my chest grew too heavy. I stared back at Peter, my arms moving up and around his torso. I hugged him. Peter Hewes died three years ago on an otherwise uninteresting evening. He was a decent brother – one I loved enough to curse the world for taking away so soon – one I just became as old as that day.

My back hit the seabed as the last of my air left me in one cloud of tiny bubbles. Everything grew darker; my vision pinpricks focused on the face that was obscured briefly by my last breath. And then laying there at the bottom of the ocean, I saw that I was hugging myself. And it was only me there, eyes glazed over, ribcage biting into my skin now that my lungs were just empty bags of muscle.

Just me.

I woke up, my right thumb this time flying to press into a meaty and solid left hand. The bed around me was soaked, my hair drenched in a cold sweat that was almost the cold waters of t

he gulf. I reached up to wipe the beads of perspiration still clinging to my brows when I felt something in my hand. A crumpled piece of paper. The tickets to the concert.