She Only Shrugged

She Only Shrugged

CHAPTER I
It’s rare for me to dream without already being half-awake. Usually, my dreams feel like deliberate daydreams me steering the wheel of my own imagination. But that morning, around 7:40, I was fully asleep when a dream found me on its own.

I was riding a small drivable mower-like machine, but it wasn’t quite a lawn mower. I was on a slow, deliberate journey, watering trees along the way. When I tried to release water through the hose, nothing came. I looked down and saw the problem a burst in the pipe. I pressed my foot over the break, and the water began to flow again, hesitant and fragile.

My partner offered to fetch someone to fix it. He left; I stayed behind. Minutes stretched like elastic, and no one came.

The surroundings took shape: a pale, neat building, like staff quarters kept in perfect order. Its walls were too plain to hold in memory, like details in a dream that slip away when you try to grasp them. The floor beneath me was soft, damp sand the kind you’d find around a Nigerian home after rain. Between small plantations maize, perhaps, and something else I couldn’t name two rats caught my eye. One large, one small, mother and child, drinking from a clear puddle in the sand.

I sat beside a growing plant whose shadow fell over the rats. For a fleeting moment, I imagined using the plant as a catapult to startle them, but the thought dissolved as quickly as it came.

A man’s voice came from inside the building deep, worn with age, perhaps fifty-five or older. “You should leave,” he said. “Don’t wait around. You can always come back.”

I hesitated but stayed.

He called again, more insistent: “Leave before someone returns.”

I tried to obey, but my legs were heavy, sluggish, unwilling to carry me. The scene shifted. Suddenly, I was on the pavement of another building, descending its long, low stretch toward the street.

Two figures appeared a woman in her forties and a young girl. They felt less like people and more like memories wearing human shapes. Both were Black, though neither looked Nigerian nor American nor South African. In an instant, they were gone.

A third figure approached a young woman about the same age as the first. Her face was a blurred thought I couldn’t quite finish. She spoke words I no longer recall, but her last ones stayed: “Leave before mummy gets here.”

I made it to the street. My legs still felt leaden, but I kept moving.

Then she appeared the old woman. Perhaps the “mummy” I’d been warned about. Her eyes caught mine. She said something I can no longer name, but my reply made her smile faintly before she turned away, leaving me behind.

When I looked again, a girl stood there my age, maybe older. She felt like a memory I once lived, though I couldn’t place where. Then two younger girls appeared, replaying a moment that didn’t belong to me but that I was forced to witness. One pushed the other down to the pavement in a one-sided fight.

I turned to the girl beside me. “Was that you?” I asked.

No answer.

The air between us was thick with grief not the loud kind, but the kind that has no space to breathe. I asked again this time about the woman I’d seen first. “Was that your mother?”

She only shrugged, opening her hands in a gesture that said she didn’t know, and perhaps never could. Something about that gesture ripped through me a sorrow too heavy for my chest.

She faded, and in her place came another image: the older woman, older still, tears cutting deep lines in her face. I begged her to tell me why this sadness clung to them. I asked if it was the building, the people, or something else. She gave me nothing.

The vision twisted back to the two young girls now one was bleeding from a wound to her head, her cry sharp against the air.

The girl in the blue gown stood apart, watching. She was tall impossibly tall and dark-skinned. Her features slipped from my memory as I tried to hold onto them.

I reached the pavement’s end when I heard a man’s voice, raw with grief. I turned, searching for the girl, but she was gone. In her place stood the man, holding the blue-gowned girl in his arms. Tears streamed down my own face before I knew they were there. I moved to touch her, to see if it was the same girl, but the man shifted away, guarding her from my reach.

Behind him, the older woman spoke in a strange language not one I knew, yet in the dream I felt its name was something close to Hall or Kastine. The words fell like prayers or curses; I couldn’t tell. The air itself seemed uneasy.

I wanted to leave, but the weight of their grief rooted me. I couldn’t abandon them without understanding, without helping. But I had no way to help.

So I prayed. Not in words I understood, but in the rolling language of my spirit. Still, the discomfort pressed against my ribs.

Then a sudden jolt. My head struck the chair I’d fallen asleep on. My eyes opened, and tears followed instantly. I was flooded with the guilt of leaving them behind, of waking without answers. The faces dissolved faster than I could recall them, slipping into that place where dreams go to hide.