Mother Collects Dreams

Mother collects dreams.
Mother sneaks into bedrooms, climbing up drain gutters and brick walls. Hand over hand, she climbs holding a glass mason jar between her teeth. When she reaches a bedroom window, Mother pries it open, sliding the edge of her thumbnail between panes of glass. 
Mother tip-toes on bare feet. On carpet her footfalls die silently. On wood or tile, there is a sipping-sucking sound as the soles of her bare feet stick to the floor like chewing gum on a sidewalk. As she presses down, there is a soft ‘squish’. As she pries her foot from the floor there is a gentle ‘pop’. The dreamer, huddled and swaddled in sheets, blue with cowboys or pink with princesses, stirs slightly. A yawn or a soft gurgle, escapes from pearled lips. 
Mother freezes, a deer in headlights, and watches with her quiet owlish eyes. In time, the normal rise and fall of sleep’s rhythm resumes.
Mother returns to stalking the bed and its occupant.
Mother stands above the bed, and gazes down at a dreaming child. It is always a child. Perhaps a boy with sheets decorated with cowboys, rockets, or superheroes. Perhaps a girl with covers adorned with princesses, unicorns, or butterflies. Their chest rises and falls in slow sugar sweet slumber, with a slack relaxed face and their hands clenched into small limp fists. From a corner of their mouth a river of luminous saliva runs out onto a pillow.
I used to sleep like that.
Now I lie awake.                                 
Mother takes the jar from between her teeth. She holds it up, and studies glass contours with the light cast by the moon. She lowers it, slowly and coldly to the child’s mouth. The glass lip of the jar kisses the lips of flesh. She speaks the words, magic older than stone, thinner than spider silk and harder than steel. The child shudders, gently and violently, and the dream begins to wiggle and worm its way from their mouth.
Mother takes the dream. It flows out of the dreamer’s mouth, a dancing-laughing-singing mess of bright colors, sounds, and shapes. The dream floods the jar, and leaves the child abandoned. You can see the difference if you look closely, the slight furrow of eyebrows, the downward curve of the lips, and the shivers that wrack their form. The signs of the ragged pustule hole left from where the dream was ripped out.

Father sets a pot to boil.
Father adds chopped potatoes, leeks and garlic. With a great spoon, he mashes them together into a silken smooth broth. He adds salt and pepper, with bits of fine Iberian ham and onions. The kitchen swells and sweaters with the scents of butter and garlic. 
I used to relish drowning in those smells.
Now I am indifferent to them.
Father takes the jars Mother brings home. He studies them, watching the shifting shapes and colors. The dreams bat around their jars in discontent, glowing like fireflies caught on a warm summer night.
Father hunts through the cabinets as the soup broils and boils. Whisks carved from dragon bone, spoons bent at arcane eldritch angles, and coffee cups with the whispers of the dead written on them in spider web cracks. 
Father found what he seeks. A great metal cheese grater, stainless steel with a black plastic grip. He holds the grater, and it trembles in anticipation.
Father unscrews the jar’s lid. He reaches in, and fishes around with his gnarled and crooked fingers. The dreams bat around the jar, searching for escape and freedom.
They never find it. 
Father’s fingers grasp the dream. It makes a sound, a fluttering and tingling chime of a bell.
Father stands above the great pot of soup, in one hand the cheese grater and in his other the dream. Then, with great deliberation and with quiet resolve, he begins to run the dream across the grater. The dream makes a sound then like glass crushing and crunching, as Father dragged it back and forth across the grater. The particles of shredded dream drifts down in a lazy dusty rainbow and settles into the soup pot.

I wait in my room.
I wait in my room, surrounded by dirty clothes strewn on the floor. My eyes trace and retrace the bends and contours of my ceiling and walls. I wait, drumming fingers on the sheets. I wait, probing into the hollow crevices and empty burrows that riddle and define my heart and mind. 
Father comes. 
In one hand, he holds a bowl of his soup, silken smooth and smelling of rank garlic. In the other he holds a spoon, rusted red at one tip. Father does not meet my eyes, and simply hands me the bowl and spoon. 
I take them and offer no thanks. 
I wait for Father to leave.
He opens his mouth, as if to say something. Then he shuts it like a fish drowning in air. He turns his back to me, and leaves me room with the click of a door closing. 
He leaves, and I stop waiting.
I take the spoon, and dip into my bowl of shimmering white. With slow, snail-like relish I fill my mouth to the brim. With silent contempt, I swallow it with great gulps. I feel the bits of dream, grit and sand, as they dance lightning bolts on my tongue. As it travels down my throat and to my stomach, they whisper to me in birdsong and ocean waves.
In my stomach, the dream-bits flutter around like butterflies, dancing around the pink and red flesh walls of my innards. Slowly, the bits and pieces discriminate and fill my silent cracks and torn holes. The remnants of dreams try to reassemble themselves, make shapes and logic out of their dust and my broken places. 
They build small cities full of miniscule people that carve poetry in my bones.
They become tiny birds that build nests in my heart and lungs.
They swim and play as dolphins weaving in and out of my veins.
I am content. 
I clean my room. I launder my clothes and sheets. 
I go outside. I run in the park, smelling freshly cut grass and feeling sweat trail down my legs. 
I laugh. I laugh with my parents as we cut into fine steaks and filets of duck breast my father has prepared. As we watch old reruns of Seinfeld on television. As we talk about finally painting the bathroom a color other than eggshell white.
For a time, I am whole.

But, slowly and surely, the small cities collapse in on themselves the miniscule people killing each other in ill-defined and self-justified crusades. 
But, surely and slowly, the birds and their nest screech and wail as they drown in the black bile of malaise that oozes and drips from my heart. 
But, in the end, the pods of Dolphins shriek and die as they are hunted and devoured by the hungry snaggle-toothed eels that spawn and swim in my blood.
I return to my room. My clothes begin to pile up once more, in large sticking piles. I trace and retrace the subtle cracks and contour of where the wall meets the ceiling. I poke and prod at myself, and silently observe as my hollowed places return. With silent contempt, with odd joy I find relish in it.
I wait.
Father sets a pot to boil.
Mother collects dreams.

 ***

Barton Drew Perkins was born and raised in Birmingham Alabama. He is an Alumni of Sewanee: The University of the South and is currently at American University working towards his MFA in Creative Writing. In his spare time, Barton enjoys reading vampire books and playing with his dogs.