the dream

a short story about a prophetic dream

When Great Uncle Stach was dying he had a series of prophetic dreams. This was the sort of casual magic I was accustomed to. I heard about spirits returning and visions my whole life, over fried eggs and glasses of whole milk, as if they were as common as the weather.

These dreams were grim. Within each was a rotten gem for each member of the family. And there was only one I had heard because it was the only one you could tell a child, the one concerning my grandmother Francis.

Francis had gone to a party that evening. When her husband’s car pulled up to the gate at the bottom of the hill, leading up to the house, they noticed the poles at the entrance were adorned with brass horse heads. It was as if Francis floated over them, the horses, over the hill, into that grand party, with black-gloved women and tinkering champagne stemware.

When it was over, back at the little house propped up on stilts on Franklin Avenue, she came into her brother Stach's room, in her beehive, caviar and elation on her breath.

There was the pervasive quietness that happens after a party. That gray-dark room with its dusty light. Its wood floors with creaking weak spots.

She sat beside him in a chair pulled close to the bed. Francis dotted poor Stach’s head. “Another nightmare, dear? Another nightmare…” she said, knowingly, and he told her in his broth-thin voice about the dream.

“Francis, oh, you were in my dream,” he said. “You were there, standing in the dirt. And sticking out of the dirt was the head of a horse. The horse was buried in the dirt up to his neck. Alive and kicking beneath the earth.”

Her eyes had now adjusted to the dark, and she could see his face. They looked at each other in silence. Stach was wearing all his years on his face, all his years at once.

“And you, in my dream, you picked up your skirt. And you leaped over its head.”

Stach wilted under his covers. “Were you scared?” she asked.

She thought of the brass adornments, the horse heads on the gate, how she even noticed a detail like that. How she even thought to think of it.

“No, no, just a fever dream. I’m just feverish,” he said. He took heavy breaths to re-orient his spirit. He longed to make light of it, but he was too sick to muster wit. Everything now was plainly spoken. Even the unbelievable.