It's Christmas time and the weather has been cold but surprisingly dry making everything look washed out and faded. I'm at the house in Falls City but it's not cluttered like I remember, it's bright and clean almost cheery in comparison to the outside world.
My brother is younger than he is now, but older than I ever remember him for a shared Christmas. When was the last one we spent together as kids? Was I a Junior or Senior in high school? He looks to be in his twenties and just as unhappy to be here as I am. "I don't want to be here." he tells me. "Why are we here?"
My mom calls us from the other room, "Boys, don't forget to turn the lights off before you go upstairs. I'm going to bed now."
The two of us look at each other. "Was that...mom?"
"Ya, I think it was." I answered.
"But, she's, you know."
"Ya, dude. I know."
I go up to bed but have a hard time getting to sleep. My room is cold and I'm going over and over in my mind the evening just ended. When had ___ looked so young? How many years since mom had died? It crosses my mind several times that I must be dreaming, or more correctly having a nightmare, but the details are so rich and vibrant, so multi-sensual from the distinct sound of my brother, to the slight musty smell of my blankets, to the cold ear on the side not on the blanket. But the most telling sign of reality is the passing of time. While my recalling here is leaving out the mundane - using the bathroom, brushing my teeth, changing out of my clothes, sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the wall with a sense of hopelessness born out of spending yet another holiday away from friends knowing that my small family would mostly be hanging out in seperate rooms except at meals.
Sometime in the middle of the night I wake up. It's far too bright in the small bedroom. At first I think a car has pulled up outside and the headlights are shining through my window. I entertain for half a moment that ___ has come to rescue me or at least join me. Instead, I see that it is snowing and has been snowing for a while. The lot next door, shouldn't there be a house there? is covered with snow. It's hauntingly beautiful. Instead of crawling back into my bed, which hasn't proved to be quite warm enough, I dress and decide to go downstairs where I can make a hot cup of tea.
I walk past a smallish sized plastic Christmas tree with perhaps half a dozen gifts around it and wonder if any of them are for me. I know that my mom would have put at least one under the tree for me. It wouldn't be anything I wanted, or could use, but I appreciated it all the same.
I make my tea and sit at a counter in the kitchen for I don't know how long. Eventually, and still in the night, my brother joins me for much the same reason as I'm there, and brews a pot of coffee for himself.
Maybe it's the smell of the coffee, or the snow, or the fact that it's Christmas morning, but my mother wakes early and talks to us from the other room where the tree and gifts are.
She calls out to me to come look at the gift that was dropped off for me after I went to bed. As I go to the room my mom is in, she goes to the kitchen. It is beginning to greatly unnerve me that I have yet to see her. ___ comes with me and I can sense that he is feeling the same.
The gift is large and has a card on the front. There are several smaller gift bags around it, and by the way they are all setting apart, I know that they are for me as well.
How is it that someone came after I went to bed, but I didn't hear them and my mother did? I've always been the light sleeper of the family, while mom and ___ have literally slept through fire trucks with sirens blaring right ouside our house.
Before I read the message in the card or read the name signed at the bottom, I know the handwriting. When I see that it is signed by ___ I am only surprised that after all that we went through that she would send a gift, perhaps delivering it herself.
I decide to grab a shower before breakfast, something to hopefully warm me up. I begin to second guess that I've correctly identified the proper ___. How many girls by that name have I known? But, I know that I'm not wrong. I'm trying to picture how she must look now as I pull back the shower curtain and stare at what I see, completely lacking any understanding of what I am looking at.
The moment hangs suspended as my brain processes what is before me. The first thing I identify is the smell which is salty and acrid, the smell of a large amount of blood. Only then do I realize that the six inch long piece of something that I've been looking at, that I've been staring at, is a human leg near the ankle and the thin three inch pieces of something around it and resting on it are fingers no longer connected to any hand. Upon this realization I can clearly see that each sports a finger nail.
Bile rises in my throat and I think that I am going to sick all over the bath tub full of body parts, and chunks of body parts. I know that it's ___. I just don't know it it's only her. There seem to be too many pieces for just one woman to be in the tub.
I mercifully turn, finally tearing away my stare from the god awful sight and leave to find my brother so that we can call the police.
I don't recall sicking up, but the taste of it is strong in my mouth, so I must have. ___ has called the police after viewing the horrifying scene for himself.
In a matter of moments, I had gone from feeling lonely and depressed, knowing that ___ was not coming to get me or to be with me, to feeling ecstatic at having ___ pop back into my life and thinking for a moment that she might be at the house or coming to the house, only then to stumble into a mind-numbing terror of discovering that she was already at the house.
I feel the vomit rising again and then ___ asks the question that had been skirting around the edge of my consciousness.
"How come we haven't seen mom? She always leaves the room right before we enter. I mean, mom's really dead right?"
The first response that pops into my mind is that the other person we've been sharing the house with must have killed ___ and is impersonating our mother. But, another thought slowly starts to form...
"___ how old are you?"
"I don't know. Don't you know?"
"What year is this? Which Christmas?"
"How the fuck do I know?"
____________________
I woke from this dream at exactly 3:39 this morning. As I process the red LED numbers I think to myself that it is still well within the witching hour.
Anybody that knows me, knows that I'm a lucid dreamer. I like to recall my dreams. Not for revelatory or psychic purposes - I think very little about dream interpretations, and would certainly never trust any self-analysis even if I was into interpreting dreams. I like to recall dreams for the fantastic stories I am telling myself.
But not last night's dream. It's many hours later and the dream is as clear as my memories of yesterday, in some ways more so since they are something above the banal of my real life.
There are no voicemails or emails from my brother, so I presume he's alright. Nore is there any indication from ___ or ___ that anything is wrong, though if ___ has been brutally murdered, I would not expect to her from here. Less literally, if she feels that I have murdered our whatever it was we had, I wouldn't hear from her.
No more analysis. It can only make me more depressed and nervous than I already am.
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