skinblade

Start from the beginning and read Dream #1

I ate my pancakes in silence.

He felt bad for what he had done and was trying to make up for it by making us breakfast. He was watching me eat from the living room. I didn’t want to look him in the eyes. I knew what it would do to him. I had my mothers eyes. Wide and blue with a guilt-inducing gaze.

Delilah was taking her time coming downstairs. I can’t blame her. Sundays were always awkward like this.

He stood up suddenly. “Do your chores,” he yelled out before the door closed behind him.

Sunday’s we would go to church when mama was alive, but now it was strictly for doing chores. Delilah still sung the hymns while she cleaned. I still thought about Sunday School stories. They were good stories. I’m fourteen now – too old to believe they were anything but symbolic tales told to help guide us towards a civilized community.

After I finished cleaning my room, I asked father if I could take Delilah to the park. Empty beer cans lay next to the lawnmower.

“What for,” he asked. He stopped trimming the hedges and glared at me. “You think she deserves to go to the park after what she said yesterday?”

“Course not, dad, but I thought you’d like to get her out of your hair for a little while, that’s all.”

He began trimming the hedges again. He was trying to make them perfectly square, but he had already made a substantial dent in the Sunday twelve-pack. The squares kept getting smaller and smaller the more he tried to work on them. “Fine,” he finally said. “Take her, but be back by supper. And tell her we’re having gaw-damned Mac ‘n cheese and she better smile while she’s eaten it.”

I never told her. We never went to the park. Instead, I took her to the Market around the corner and let her pick out whatever candy she wanted. She was wise enough to pick candy I wouldn’t object to – nothing that would stain her clothes so that father would find out. I paid for the candy and we made our way down Main Street, towards Cindy’s house.

Cindy was my girlfriend, and Delilah loved to spend time at her house. Cindy had dirty blonde hair, blue eyes that seemed to glint orange if the light were right, and a voluptuous body underneath her loose clothes which made her look much older than fifteen. She was beautiful and I didn’t quite understand why she liked me.

Cindy collected trinkets. Cindy loved to talk about rock bands that no one had ever heard about, but her. Cindy was one of the few people I talked to at school.

Cindy was also one of the few people that listened to Delilah’s stories about her dreams. Cindy never told me that that’s what they talked about, but I could tell by the way my sister would glance at me periodically while I was playing Cindy’s Nintendo games.

I could see her through my peripheral vision. I took a second to glance back at her, but when I looked back at the screen, my little moto-man was rolling on the digitized dirt along with his bike. It was too late for me to try to catch up with the other moto-men.

“What’s the matter?” Cindy asked when I turned the game off.

“She keeps looking at me,” I tried to say in my most ‘grown-up’ voice. It didn’t come out quite right. I still ended up sounding like a ten year old boy.

“Ahh,” Cindy pretended to sympathize for me. And in a baby voice she asked, “is yo li’l sistah lookin’ at jew?”

“I wasn’t looking at you!” Delilah exclaimed.

“I could see you out of the corner of my eye,” I said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

Delilah straightened up instantly. She knew she wasn’t supposed to talk about the magic, or the dreams, with anybody. I had made a promise to mama that I would keep it a secret. Delilah had made the same promise, too. Mama knew that bad things would happen if we told people.

“And what did you think we were talking about?” Cindy asked me.

Delilah nodded her head in disagreement, as if she had not said anything to Cindy about the magic, about the dreams.

I smiled. “She’s telling you about the dreams,” I answered.

“No,” Delilah said, “I wasn’t!”

Cindy looked at Delilah, then at me. “She was telling me how good she’s getting at reading. What dreams?” she asked.

My heart sank. For a split-second I felt like an idiot. Was I wrong? I felt like I had broken my promise to mama, and my insides began to twist and curl. My mouth became dry.

Continue reading: Dream #6 - A Confession