Scales

Prompt: Write about how a nighttime dream comes true.

My sister is dreaming of fish again. I can smell them.

Since They came we share a space with no window, with a yellow line of light that marks a floorboard overhead. We watch that line of light. We keep our eyes open in the dark in case it comes again unexpectedly. In case They find us.

Every night since we hid here – and all day too sometimes, my sister lies there on the floor with her eyes closed, suffering, remembering. I know when she sleeps for a film of water appears at her lips, pours over and the first fish slips out to die in a fold of her nightdress or under her buckled arms.

It was a new horror at first when it happened. I felt the dark walls rush in and almost – almost – screamed. But she wakes each morning with a little less emptiness in her eyes than the night before, a little more life. I said to her that in this darkness maybe our thoughts have become real. That maybe she has found a way to jettison through metaphor what has happened to us. She looked frightened. “You’re dreaming,” she said and I said “probably”. This strangeness helps her survive — leave it at that.

I lie beside her in the damp with my hands over my eyes so I can’t see the fish slide out of her, alive but already decomposing. She will be all right, I think, my little sister. She will get through this. I’m not sure about myself. There is death swimming in me but I’m stoppered tight. I’m a bottle of rotting memories, corrosive and unreleased.