1


Enrique Tyndall Garcia gave up trying to get back to sleep, rolled over, and looked at the time.
The digital alarm clock read 4:33.
After a night such as the one through which he had just tossed and turned, churning the bedclothes into a Gordian tangle, he always felt as if he had not slept a single second. But he must have slept some; he had dreamed the same dream again.
As with all such dreams in the last year and a half, last night's remained deadly static and monochrome…and as bad as any of them. Not that he had sensed any particular threat or danger in the dream; he might have even preferred a nightmare with Prometheus' eagle ripping at his chest to the usual debilitating weakness the dreams brought.
He could take some small comfort from the fact that the dream no longer attacked every third night as it had at first after Kathy died. Although more infrequent now, it had lost none of its awllike, piercing intensity when it did come, stabbing at him last night exactly as it had in the beginning.
In the dream everything was fogged a cloudy, pewter gray. Kathy, leaving the house and wearing the black Mexican ball gown he had bought her in Guadalajara on their honeymoon, carried her suitcase out to a black car with an interior hidden by that damned dark-tinted glass he despised. He tried to follow, but found he could not open the storm door she had shut behind her, no matter how hard he wrenched at the handle or hammered at the aluminum frame. He called, but she did not even turn her head.
After she reached the car waiting in the driveway, and put her bag in its trunk, she stepped to the door on the passenger's side and finally looked back at him. He opened his mouth to beg her not to leave, but could not force a sound through his lips. Standing by the car she looked pathetic, frail—her slim face, wearing the faintest of smiles, seemed wan and drawn—but in some dark way even lovelier than in life.
She shook her head, opened the car door and got inside.
He could not see the driver, but he knew him. He tried to call to him, too, but not even his name would come.
The car backed out of the driveway, turned into the cottonwood-lined street, and was lost to sight where the road snaked past the ancient and winter-dry irrigation ditch. All was vacant silence and stillness for a moment.
Then the rest of the dream leaped into motion, became a shapeless cloud of swirling, choking dust as black as soot, as if big, slabsided Cuchillo Peak on the eastern horizon had somehow blown itself apart and settled its powdered stone on top of him.
Two nights after Kathy died the dream had started and, even though some details differed slightly, it still ended exactly the same, with its smothering load of black dust and irrational but even blacker guilt.
In broad daylight it was easy enough to persuade himself that he had not been at fault and nothing he could have done would have changed the end. His intellect told him that what had happened that night would have happened sooner or later. Kathy had carried the seeds of death in her character and her psyche long before they married. He knew he was right and guiltless…in the daytime…at high, bright noon. But at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning, in the empty, silent super-dark, that rational mind did not so much as put in a brief appearance.
There was one blessed thing about last night's dream: It had ended sharply and completely. They did not always do that.

Copyright © 2002 by Virginia S. Malone