Crossed Wires

So they were gone, and he was alone. And awake. Rain was spitting against the window, drizzling loudly enough to be a distraction. It always seemed to be raining.

He knew he had dreamt, and vividly. The images were slipping away quickly, but he remembered a huge chandelier, hanging like a half-melted icicle above a long oak table full of relatives he didn’t know. Drunk on wine, they ran spindly unfamiliar fingers through his hair, commenting on how handsome he had grown to be, how fine and solid his features his filled out to be.

As he watched the room disappear around him, feeling smaller and smaller and more horribly detached from this family-that-wasn’t-really, their leathery hands softened into hers, soft and smelling of jasmine; and their wretched patronizing laughter became hers, delicate as chimes at dawn.

Comfortable happiness swelled within him then, like bubbles rising in a glass, and they held each other tightly in the backseat of some dream-car in a dream-field in a surreal backwoods landscape while it started to rain lightly all around.

That was where the dream had crossed wires with reality, where it was storming. He reoriented himself beneath cool white blankets and listened to the house stirring to life beneath him. The girl in the dream slipped away like so many dust motes in the sunshine, a phantom scattered by abrupt movement, never to be rearranged in quite the same casually organized pattern again.

Forgetting her and forgetting the dream, he climbed out of bed.