DREAM LIFE DECAY
I run around Diamond Park under red glow, a gentle stirring in the air like steam rising. Pink clouds floating by me in sluggish lanes, and my eyes never settle on one spot; a black-eyed golden retriever with devil horns, the moon reaching below skyscrapers, the ground torn in and replaced by ebony-colored rubble. I hear a round of shots echoing from above, I’m opening the eyes I didn’t know were closed.
—And still, I’m only half awake. Every blink is bathing me in red glow.
But every moment I’m opening my eyes again, finding a white grainy ceiling, and
shifting above torn leather. Then a brown face peering down at me, sagged under tired lines heightened with fright, to a closer, louder cry of gunfire, until the leather couch beneath me becomes oak flooring, until the looming brown face becomes my crying mother, arching her body over mine as glass distantly shatters.
My eyelids slip shut, the red glow fragments.
My hips swaying in navy blue, and worlds expand like I’ve eaten the wonderland cake. I’m smaller, in uniform, a white stained polo and a pleated polyester skirt. My hair has regressed half a decade, the swarm of coils split into two and braided on either side, white flower barettes poke my cheeks whenever my head moves. I see my third grade playground and a crowd of kids without faces to linger on. I hear the recess bell extending well beyond it’s scheduled four-second ring, and suddenly it’s all I hear, suddenly every kid is running to somewhere behind me but I can’t move my feet. My sight is fixated on the oak trees coating the hills. The flurry of feet trample my own.
—And I rise again to a soft voice repeating my name. My skin nipping and breaking in
the creases of the oak floors.
My mother’s fist clenched around the hem of my nightgown, and dragging me through the living room, to the kitchen. My toes clamp down as well, and I try not to flinch when a nail snags off from one of the jagged tiles. The shots are closer, there are doors somewhere opening and closing. Brandon’s face is frozen in the doorway. He looks surprised, but not startled, and I know he’s been awake the entire night. He is saying something to my mother. My mother’s face is becoming bothered. Their voices are raising, to yelling, firing, yelling, silence. With my face on the floor, I see his blue striped socks move swiftly away from the kitchen.
In the back of my head, a dream still spinning. I close my eyes for one minute, two, three.
I’m with my father now in the old silver pickup, turning in the roundabout. Brandon and Breah ride in the back with the groceries, laughing at Iyla across the street as she gapes at the floating kids. Dad yells something out the window, and they immediately sink back down. I’m thinking about my red and white bicycle. I’m hoping Mom will let me blow up the kiddie pool for the second time today. I’m picking which Barbie to bring with me to bath time, and a thick, hot breeze smothers my face. Dad lifting me out from the car seat, Brandon and Bread lugging in the bags. I smell potatoes in the kitchen. Gospel music stubbornly pours out of every speaker.
A red glow in every corner of the house. The walls bend back.
—And the hot breeze turns cold, and Mom is hugging me tightly from behind, yelling over my shoulder and in my ear. Brandon opens the front door, and I swear I hear bullets thumping along my porch. He’s yanking himself away and throwing the door back into it’s hinges. He’s on his knees, crawling to the slump that is my mother and I, and his voice is half wonder, half dread, going on about some guy with an Ak-47, about never seeing a gun that close before, and I am watching my brother for the first time become somebody else.
I’m fully awake and waiting hours for the sirens. They rarely come here. I’m looking out the window and seeing neighbors uneasily do the same. A man across the way is talking loudly, saying all the cars got fucked up, and Mom is praying on the edge of her blow up bed that her car is still in shape to take her to work in the morning. Brandon’s excitement for the night has trickled out, and he shuffles back into the bedroom. I’m sitting on the black leather couch, as my cat, Dyson, purrs against my ankle.
The cops come when all has already become final. They knock on the door and ask my mom a few questions. I squirm when one’s eyes falls on my tense shoulders, and they’re saying words, but my mind can’t form the sentences, sounds become an auditory collage, “gang,” “suspect,” “dead,” “dead,” “gang,” and I’ve been up for too long. I go back to my spot on the couch and drape the quilt over me, I feel a weight pounce over my legs and settle at my feet. I think of faraway things, and picture the red glow in only a corner of the ambiguous dark of my eyelids.
And I’m there in Diamond Park, in navy blue, leaning out the window of the old silver pickup. I hear a gentle stirring become the clangs of a school bell, I smell heat in the air, threatening to surround and smother me. And I’m waiting for a body to form, feet to somehow carry me like they never have before.
Amaya Jones is a junior and English major at NYU, with a minor in creative writing and media communications. It’s her third year living in New York, though she grew up in Northern California and spent most of her childhood living in Oakland and Sacramento. While her writing tendencies lean more toward the poetic side, she’s recently widened her creative scope to short fiction and nonfiction pieces. If not writing, her time is spent working on the editorial board for one of her school’s undergraduate literary magazines. This will be her second publication in a creating writing journal, and her first nonfiction publication.