Slumber

I am dreaming of our old family house, the one we lived in before All That happened and Dad and Brian left me and Mother and we became inseparable the way loss makes you.

In the dream, I am wandering around and looking at all the rooms: the kitchen with its little linoleum table in garish diner colors, the old Frigidaire humming along like a patient drone; the living room with the wood-paneled walls and the tacky mounted taxidermy fish from Dad's evenings at the lake. We'd sit there under the recessed lights and play games, dice clacking across the scarred coffee table.

Upstairs, I stand in the door to the room Brian and I shared, looking at the bunk bed shoved up against the wall, the red bean bag under the window that looks out over the back garden. The wall is marked with crayon just to the right of the gauzy curtains, a swoop of violent black against the white paint, from when we wanted to practice our signatures. Mother was not happy upon finding out.

I travel the hall between here and my parents’ room, searching for the light switch between, when I notice some of the flowered wallpaper is torn, peeling away from humidity. We never had AC, and the summer months would get thick with heat in this house. It was just one more thing that caused her and Dad to fight. I put a hand over the peeling wallpaper, smoothing it back. Then, on impulse, I press the tips of my fingers into the wall beyond and it gives, the damp plaster caving into the hollow space beneath.

My heart is filled now with disquiet, like a winter morning. I don't want to see, but the house begs me to, plying at my wrists, engulfing them like a wet mouth. I take the edges of the hole I've made and spread it wider. A sense of deja vu trickles down my spine.

Your father left and he's not coming back. He took your brother with him.

It was always hard to believe- Mother was always the one so distant, the one who sometimes looked at me and Brian like things she regretted purchasing. Sometimes she looked at me and she wasn't there in her own eyes.

I stop digging now, the plaster falling around me; I see them now. There in the darkness they sleep just like me, their necks crooked back, eyes wide and staring in their cold faces. I know it. I always knew it.

The lock turns in the door downstairs, waking me, and when she comes in, I am standing in the middle of the kitchen. She drops her grocery bags to the floor at the sight of me. Our roles are reversed now. I am the parent, and she is the errant child I caught scribbling on the wall.

"What have you done?" I ask, my voice calm and steady, benevolent like God.