I Dreamed a Dream

Sorry, that's the second title I've borrowed (stolen) from Les Miserables. This one is, however, actually adapted from a dream I had when I was sleeping in front of the TV yesterday.

I Dreamed a Dream
by Jill C.

I don't know wheather to leave or not. He said it was all done, and I should just go home until tomorrow. Something keeps me there, though. He's tired of looking after me. He's left and gone into the office. No doubt to help another paying customer. Or to eat a doughnut. It's such a morbid business, though, that it doesn't matter. It fills him up either way. With flour and sugar or with cash.

He's left me in order to go back to work. That bothers me. Hers is not the only one in the frigid room. That bothers me too. It's so impersonal. He sees it so often that he won't or can't or maybe isn't capable of getting involved. It feels wrong. Who ever turned it into a line of work, anyway? Why can't we go back to the olden days when the famailies dug the graves themselves, behind the barns on their farmsteads? Who ever wanted to be a mortition? That's not what they call them anymore. It's not glamorous enough. Who ever wanted to be a funeral services director? A memorial councelor? A damned cold hearted idiot who can rattle off the names of every wood in the forest without the slightest inflection in his voice that would make me understand that he's talking about coffins rather than trees?

Hers looks like a treasure chest. I imagine grave robbers as pirates, hoisting her in the air with joyous yells and carrying her back to their ship. She probably would have liked that.

I lay my hand on the polished mahogony, fighting with myself inside. I want to see her. So badly. Just one more time. One more time, before... I don't want to see her like this. In that dress he chose from the rack of random, cheaply made garnments that were meant to look fancy. With her hair curled. Sprayed with so much rosy perfume to keep the smell of death away. Except it wasn't the smell of death, but the stench of chemicals. Anything to keep her "pretty" for one more day.

She is to be viewed tomorrow. So hers isn't locked. She isn't yet beyond reach. I can't help myself. I slowly raise her lid.

Pale, and small. Too pale. Too small. Her chubby face is gone, the skin retracting toward the bone. She looks like a sick child. Like she had progeria, or some other disfiguring disease. But she didn't. She was just a normal little girl. And now she's gone. And this... this is here in her place.

I can see the powder of hair spray on her dark ringlets. She looks more like a doll. I imagine one of the plastic babies she used to play with. The kind with eyes that opened and closed. I raise her shoulders up. Click. The eyes open. Back down. Click. They close.

Her mouth opens in a tiny gasp. Some broken sound, unintelligible to me, yet the most beautiful sound in the world comes from between her dry, pale lips. It floats to my ears as tears fal from my eyes. Then she is gone. Again.

I clutch myself around the middle, pinching into the baby weight that I still have not managed to lose after four years. I wish those final moments would fly away, leave me be. I want the happy memories, not those. Not of her leaving me.

I brush my fingers on her tender eyelids, then make the sign of the cross on her forehead. Then I close her up, and turn around. I leave. I don't want to be there any longer. Not with them. Not with her.

It's not her that's there. She's already blown away. Why am I expected to hang on to that sick doll? It's not her. It's all wrong.

My little Ana, who wore a ponytail, and read fairytales and books about pirates. Who prefered green cotton shorts, even in winter. That's what I want to hold on to. What I want to remember.

I want to remember the cherry popsicle all over the back seat of my car. The wall at home with badly disgiused crayon drawings. The dirty old football we'd played with in the neighbor's yard.

I want to remember that, not her last breaths leaving her lungs. Not the tears in her eyes as he, he who I dared ever call my husband, hit the life out of her. Not the cops dragging him off to jail. Or the EMT dragging her out in a body bag.

Those memories need to go, to fly away. But they need to go in the opposite direction of Ana's soul.
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I didn't realize how morbid that was until after I wrote it out. In my dream, it was more like a bad horror movie, but I thought it would make better use as a public service announcement about domestic violence and child abuse in New Mexico.