ONE
Steps to keep away the dead (a family remedy):
1. Crush tea leaves
2. Add to cup of boiled water
3. Drink every single drop within thirty minutes
4. Repeat twice a day, every day … forever.
Except it doesn’t keep them out completely. Most nights when sleep finds me, so do the spirits. They don’t interact with me, but I can see their shadows lurking in the void space of my sleep. Mom says it was bad before the tea. They would talk to you in your dreams, touch you, and worse: find you while you were awake.
I’m not scared to dream, but she says I should be.
I put my cup on the windowsill and listen to the sounds of night while I wait for Derek Johnson to come out of his house across the street. He’s late. Twenty minutes past the time he’s been coming out the last couple weeks. Maybe he’ll stay in. Maybe …
His front door opens.
Nerves steal my breath. I hide behind my blackout curtains to peek at him through my binoculars. He’s wearing a yellow hoodie under a jean jacket and sunglasses. Sunglasses with dark lenses, even though it’s night. But stranger than that is what he does. How he stands on the top step, so still and unmoving, for so many seconds I remind myself to breathe. When he finally moves, he glides down the steps like a phantom, otherworldly, but then he does something different. He walks over to the rosebush crawling up the side of his house. It’s an everblooming rosebush that brushes his bedroom window and has for well over a decade. He just stares at it.
I squint through the binoculars to get a good look. Maybe there’s an animal hiding between the branches. Maybe something is wrong.
Minutes pass before he turns and walks across the lawn to the sidewalk and up the street, fading into the distance and darkness as he goes.
My hands shake as I hang my binoculars and prepare for sleep. Not that I want to. What I want is to find out where Derek goes on these late-night adventures. Does he meet up with someone? There’s an urge in my body to know, to find out, and it’s hard to quiet. Each night, I consider going after him to see for myself, and the urge turns into a deep ache somewhere down in my bones, in my marrow. I can’t pretend he doesn’t exist the way he pretends I don’t exist, but I shouldn’t go after him. He’d catch me, I’m sure of it. And I can’t ask him what’s going on because he won’t speak to me at all. Not after he ended our friendship two years ago.
I try to bury the urge while scribbling in my journal, hoping the street wakes to distract me. My neighbors usually give me something to write about with their late-night arguments, the pit bulls barking from backyards and their outdoor cats making hellish breeding sounds. They make a movie for me many nights, but not this one. I consider watching The First 48, but my eyes are too heavy. Mom is working an overnight shift, so I lock my bedroom door and put a chair against it. I’d never tell her that sometimes I’m scared to be home alone because she’d tell me to stop watching the gruesome things I watch. She has no choice but to work.
My room goes hazy as I crawl into bed, the tea fast at work, but before sleep pulls me under I pray that whatever Derek’s doing he’s being safe.
* * *
The world tilts. Dulls and darkens. My fingers are in front of me, manicured nails painted white even here. I have ten of them. Not eleven, not nine, but this is still a dream. I’m conscious of it, even though I shouldn’t be. My eyes flick around. This is nothingness. It’s not pitch-black but a dark gray, as if dense storm clouds strung together to suffocate out all of the daylight. A shadow space.
With each step I take on this gray plane, my feet make ripples on its moving surface. I open my mouth, try to use my voice, but haven’t mastered speaking here yet. My throat hurts—tingles and burns—but if I could call out, I don’t think the spirits would answer. My limbs feel too thick to move on my own, but suddenly I’m lifted and dropped again. I’m hanging upside down, or right side up, then I’m floating. Gravity moves how it wishes here so I don’t fight trying to control my body anymore. But then I feel my skin prick all over. My stomach squeezes before I see them slithering. The spirits are wisps of white and black wafting through this world, circling me. They slide through the crevices, the open spaces between my body parts. They could almost touch me, almost. I try to move away from them, but there are so many of them and only one of me and the gray space between all of us goes darker.
But then … something new happens. I’m dumped into a different dream where I’m falling from a sky that looks like the one of my waking world. My stomach is ripped away as I drop, drop, drop. The wind burns my lungs and …
I think. I might. Die.
Until I hit the ground with a thud, and there is no more darkness. An anomaly. This has never happened when I dream of the gray. Here, it’s a bright day, the sun hurts my eyes, but I blink the world into view, my house sitting across the street. I can smell … roses.
“Where have you been?” Derek’s voice calls, and I twist my body to him. He is younger. Fifteen, and climbing out of his window while the branches of the rosebush grow like they’re trying to climb inside of it. He jumps down, his arm scratching against the leaves and thorns. He plucks a pink Pippin rose off its branch to hand to me, smiles. “They’re in full bloom now.”
The rose is yellow around the edges and beautiful in my palm. I bring it to my nose, inhale the sweet fragrance as he watches me. But then the smell starts to change. Rancid, rotting. I gag and hold it away from my body.
“What’s wrong, Aria?” Derek says, and when I look up at him, his dark skin goes pale until it starts to fade. He tries to touch his face, but his hand goes right through it. “Aria.” His voice is thin, scared. It makes my heart thrum. Before I can reach for him, he is nothing but wisps of black, and the world around us both goes gray.
Text Copyright © 2023 by Marissa M. Neilson
Interior Illustrations Copyright © 2023 by Lyndall Clipstone
