A Bright House

Time, as you can see, has never been as simple as we might like to think. It is a fluid thing that adapts according to our state of consciousness. - J.Randles

Jenny was a vivid dream walker for as long as she could remember. Her astral travels were restless, as though her soul sought to connect with memories of the parents who had abandoned her. Jenny frequently flew over alien landscapes at night, lit by multiple moons, covered in strange forest growth, and suffered anxiety within those recurring flight dreams that she would suddenly lose the power to remain aloft; would make landfall upon those terrifying unknown places. Some of Jenny’s dreams involved men not known to her, though rarely did they involve physical intimacy. They may have been actual imprints of men from her workplace, or those encountered in the small circuit of her Toronto existence. Something within her demeanor, perhaps her eyes that rarely made direct contact, held the opposite sex to a distance. Was it an aloofness? An air of otherworldly detachment? Was it because Jenny so often viewed herself, her very life and the movements within its small circle, as though she were directing and not living her movie?

In mirrors, she could see that her features were delicate. Her face held a coveted symmetry. The nose was petite, the forehead smooth into a lush tumble of curls and waves. Her mouth was ironically expressive for someone who had closed off the bridge between thought and conveyance. Two graceful lines from the sides of her nostrils arced downward to bracket those exquisite lips. A three hundred year old portrait in a forgotten attic. A stanza in the poem of a first love, recited by a vanished husband, though he could never write his own. The mouth and its charismatic framing lines suggested a woman who once laughed and sang her heart. In mirrors, Jenny could see why she attracted attention. She could even more clearly see why men were reluctant to approach her. The dream flight of Friday night arrived in the hour before dawn, and she was at first aware of being alone in a vast crop field. The time of day impossible to ascertain, though the sky held a strange xanthous aura. Almost a nebulous amber halo floating within the open blue that seemed to be arriving or departing as one dimension bled into another. As so often in these astral projections, Jenny at first was not aware of her body; she had only vision. Out across the acres stretched wide open horizon in a completed circle. She turned slowly and felt her feet then. Looked down at herself to see that she wore only panties and a small t-shirt, but felt nothing emotionally. This surprised the part of her mind that remained in the house on Bright street, and the dream could have ceased its weave then and “there”...

The vast field in which Jenny found herself was yielding a crop not recognizable to her, being in its early stages. Low and with broad leaves of a rich green. The temperature was pleasant, the wind gentle, and she became aware of her first emotion when unable to find the sun. A disoriented dizzy moment. She turned again, slower, and scanned the distance for anything to guide her movements. Far away and nested in amongst a stand of tall trees, a white barn, a silo, a square Victorian era house also clad in white wood. From the house a long line of parallel trees flanked a narrow dirt road that melted into invisibility over a low rise. She began to walk carefully toward the buildings, placing her bare feet deliberately between the wide rows of young crop. The soil was a rich chestnut and felt cool between her toes, under the arches and heels of her steps. There was the awareness of other realm. She felt no panic over the displacement, having dreamed many times of exotic alien landscapes but with this being her first landing. That notion was clear to her as she walked the long row between growing plants; that she had flown here. Not a jagged astral plane edit. A flight, a choice, a deliberate placement even as the reason eluded her dreaming mind.

Somehow her steps seemed to cover the elongated distance in a way not associated with earthly gait. Distracted by searching the yellow bled blue canopy for its missing sun, she walked and walked and found herself abruptly quite close to the property. It caused her to pause. She questioned why it was that in dreams, she had no sense of smell... where was the rich pungency of the ploughland? The scented zephyr?

She could hear the soft whisper of the crop leaves, feel the warmth of the breeze on her exposed skin. It was the rear of the house that faced her. Two levels with paint peeling, but a solid structure well situated. The barn was large, its hulking form a hundred yards removed from the home. Several shells of vehicles sat abandoned or in various stages of restoration, to the side and rear of the barn and silo. Jenny began to approach with small steps, her eyes fixed on the four square windows of the house. She left the perimeter of the crop and walked through high brown grass until reaching the first of the tall trees that formed a quasi fence around the property. Standing behind the wide trunk and under wind talking leaves, Jenny watched the windows for movement. Old curtains hung on the second level, their floral prints on thick fabric of a dirty ivory hue, evoking a strong echo of peculiar familiarity. She was doing it again. She was searching for her biological parents. Dream time being most elastic, impossible to define or understand upon waking, Jenny stood behind the tree and waited for the impetus to approach yet closer.

A dim awareness that she was in dream state arrived to nudge her toward the house. She moved carefully along the right side of the building, dry grass rasping against her bare legs, and kept her eyes glued to the side windows. No movement. All panes dark and still. At the balustrade of the veranda, she paused when the winds picked up appreciably. A feeling that matched the nuanced ominous undertow of earlier, pulling her down into a want of fear, birthed itself with the increased air movement. As there was no sun in the strangeness of the sky, there was no scent of century old wood siding, antique oil tank beneath the main floor window, untended desiccated grass. She could feel her exposed skin, the beating of her heart, and the warm air. Gusts made the veranda shingles vibrate. She moved two steps forward and reached with her left hand to wrap fingers around the bottom of one of the cracked and peeling porch spindles. Then arrived a two sided intensity of emotion; that she wanted to awaken yet couldn’t stand the thought of leaving this foreign place before getting the reason for landing... and she moved one more step forward to peer through the rail spindles along the wide plank floorboards of the long veranda.

The first object was a slipper. A fuzzy yellow slipper on its side, the foot opening rimmed with olive green accent. Just beyond it, a pair of spectacles with small oval lenses, one arm broken at the hinge and jutting upward as though indicating where Jenny must next look. Without air in her lungs to scream, she beheld a scene that was stilled within the horrific wrongness of its composition. From the slipper clad foot to its bare counterpart. From the varicose articulation of each calf muscle upward into the dress. From the curved inward fingers of each hand, clutching at the garment in what must have been a morbid battle of tragic willpower... the woman’s digits locked to fabric beside each hip. Up went Jenny’s watering eyes. Up the back of the woman to the thick rope’s bite. Deep into soft neck tissue with a vulgar knot punching the base of her skull. Up past the piled high hair that had lost most of its bobby pins, to the heavy hook embedded into the veranda ceiling. Jenny stared in horror at the back of the woman’s head. She retreated a half step to place a spindle into her line of sight, remembering to breathe. Two rocking chairs on the porch had been spread apart; the closest one to Jenny held a potted plant that must have been removed from the fatal ceiling hook. She stared into its vivid blooms, beginning to cry softly but feeling the depth of sorrow within its up-swell. A round serving table with ornately turned legs was pushed up against the front railing, and upon looking at it did Jenny hear an approaching vehicle.

Far from the house and raising a wake of dust came a beaten truck carrying large bags, a lawnmower that could be driven, and a lone occupant. It slowed, made the turn into the long narrow path toward the property, and Jenny crouched to watch between spindles. Another reminder of waking reality announced itself, almost an option, but she chose to remain.

It was reminiscent of recurring dreams involving lost unread newly discovered letters from Scott. Letters that she caught tantalizing glimpses of but was annoyingly distracted from by other duties that seemed to take place in a hybrid location of her home and the diner... letters that she never had the chance to read before waking. She vowed to stay in the horror of this dream until something made sense. The truck neared and then suddenly stopped. The brakes locked up and brown dust lifted around the cab, carried off on the winds. She could see the driver lean forward to stare through the dirty windshield, and caught sight of his eyes. A loud rusty creak accompanied his opening the door. He almost fell from the truck, then lurched into a run across the tall front lawn. Jenny’s tears increased. She wiped at her eyes violently and hunkered down, staring at the young man as he halted before the first step to the porch.

His long hair blew wildly, away from the house as if to mimic the life being sucked out of him. It whipped across his features and she saw who it was. As if kicked in the stomach she began to wail and stood to her full height. He didn’t see her. She cried and gripped with two hands the spindles, feeling the tears as though ripped from her belly, acid-pumped through her heart, and giving permission for her to express the loss of Scott. And so it all came forth. The young man stood frozen in his own spill, unable to move and blind to the astral visitor. He loosed a deep moan that formed union with the alien winds before shaping the long guttural “no” into the return to a bed in a front bedroom of a house on Bright street.

The alarm began in perfect pitch to match the young Ray’s first sound of utter loss and abandonment. Jenny found herself not beneath the blankets but exposed and in a strange self-hugging posture that she had never been aware of in the past. Her arms were folded over each other and across her chest. Each hand gripped a shoulder with force. The clock tone thrummed her from one reality to a more familiar one, and she relaxed her fingers, bit her bottom lip, shook her head against the dampened pillow case.

For that Saturday early morning, as Jenny moved through the ritual of rising, showering, making toast and tea, she had no intuitive cognition that a day of such tumultuous beginning would become the most important day of her mortal lifetime. This is the way of the universe. What is revealed, no matter its power over the senses, is never indicative of the whole. In fact, and Jenny felt this without the language to prove it as truth, the human idea that anything could be made whole, could complete, would definitively answer, was a mere trick of mortality.

If we probe, via the many strange phenomena of time, into the center of reality itself, we suddenly discover that space, time, past, future, cause and effect are simply words. - J.Randles