Dreams are the greatest power of mankind. In our waking hours, we dream of more, imagining our futures as they teeter on hopes, hard work, and a little luck. But when we sleep, our subconscious mind takes over, and it is a beast that cannot always b...
I hung the crowbar on my wall as a reminder of what we'd all lost, retying the yellow ribbon and thinking of how many hands my crowbar has passed through. Taro had bestowed it to me, but Sven had coveted it whenever I let it slip from my sight. Lexington had wielded it to protect me from Xin, and Kearo had used it to end the dream that I'd been too weak to break free from. The constant reminder of who I'd loved and lost led to my eventual downfall though, and my daily nightmares turned to hallucinations in my waking hours.
Lexington's ghost paid me a visit first, leaning against a tree on my evening walk home, and I stopped to stare directly at him. His dark hair shaded his inhumanly crimson eyes, and his fangs shined as he opened his mouth, but as soon as my name slipped from his lips in a ghastly whisper, I ran for the hills. That didn't stop him from lingering around every corner, lying on my bus bench, or hanging upside down from trees with his arms crossed.
No matter how I rubbed my eyes, he never disappeared, and eventually he just watched me as a silent statue. A memory without will or words stalked me until I was desperate enough to change my route to get rid of him, and that's when the real fun started.
The side streets gave ghost Lexington less things to sit on or lean against, but they ran me past restaurant back doors with dumpsters that smelled of mold and day old meat. Luckily, I was past them and heading between apartment building entrances before my brain decided to have a complete melt down.
A hand grabbed me from the shadows of one of the doorways, and I swung around to come face to face with more white than the moon could handle on a cloudless night. Silver sparkled on the embroidery of a grey overcoat that overlapped the whites of Sven's airy sleeves, and I yanked out of a hand with ghostly skin and shimmering with scales.
Golden eyes looked me over, and Sven's mouth opened to reveal pointed teeth that would cost tens of thousands in cosmetic surgery. I might be able to hallucinate well, but I couldn't imagine someone grabbing me, which meant I'd superimposed Sven's face onto a mugger. I should have gotten therapy the moment I started seeing Lexington.
"Just take it." I fumbled for my wallet and tossed the contents at him before the guy started breathing fire. Coins bounced and bills fluttering as I ran and didn't stop until I was out on the main streets next to a construction zone. With it lit up and bustling with laborers for nighttime work, the mugger wouldn't follow.
The cranes lifting and dropping beams and pallets of bricks cast long shadows from the low hanging sun, and I absorbed the sights and sounds to calm my frantic heartbeat. This corner had been barren since the movie store had gone out of business years back, and it struck me to see the monument of my past demolished and built over like it had never existed.
"More to the left!" A voice yelled above the motors of bulldozers further out, and my heart skipped as the man nearest the fence waved a hand to the crane operator. Tightly tied brown hair under a yellow hard hat fluttered with the rush of wind from the materials dropped to the ground, and I tangled my fingers with the chain link fence as Kearo gave his coworker a thumbs up.
I was certifiable.
One of the men said something to Kearo that I couldn't hear past a jackhammer breaking up old concrete, but a smile spread his face and lit up his eyes. Kearo's voice conquered the cacophony with a gentle laugh that had tears slipping down my cheeks, and as he lifted the bottom of his sleeveless shirt to dab sweat off of his mouth, his blue eyes met mine. For a moment, he lingered, but his focus returned to his task like I was no one significant.
It wasn't him.
It couldn't be him.
I kept telling myself that as I slipped under the loose chain in the gate to squeeze inside. It didn't matter if he was an illusion or not if I could see him and be by his side for just another moment. Only a few feet into my trespass, a whistle blew, every motor in the area stalled as men yelled at each other, and then Kearo was at my side.
"You can't be in here," he said, his hand corralling me away from the crane's work area while never really touching me, and a few men followed to see what was going on.
"It's not 'invite your girlfriend into an active work zone' day, newbie." The foreman's stern wrinkled face sagged into a frown as he whacked Kearo on the head with his schematic for the building.
"That's not what this is," Kearo grumbled as he adjusted his hard hat, and the younger man next to the foreman laughed as he made a heart with his hands.
"Get back to work, Jimmy," the foreman yelled, and the guy huffed a breath as he skipped back to the construction site. "You taking your hour early?"
"Yes, sir," Kearo sighed as he rubbed the back of his neck. "Let me get her out of here, and I'll back by shift change." Kearo gestured for me to walk a safer path out, and my heart hammered in my chest as he followed me to the parking lot that bordered the nearby park.
This wasn't Kearo. Just some guy who was about to get fired for paying too much attention to me, and as he collapsed on a concrete parking barrier with a tired groan, my knees wobbled. What did he want? Or did he expect me to just wander off like the crazy person I was?
"Sit, Heidi." My name on his lips had me plopping on the asphalt of the open parking spot as my knees finally gave. "I didn't expect you out this late. You normally pass the site before the sun gets this low. Even so, don't walk into an active construction site like a lunatic. Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
There was zero amusement in Kearo's scathing blue eyes as he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and popped one between his lips. With a hand on his chin, he slumped forward and blew a wisp of air that drifted and brought the scent of sweet candy to my face. It refreshed the tears in my eyes, and so many questions collided in my head that I couldn't say anything.
I just cried.
"The real world sucks, by the way," Kearo eventually said, his tired sky eyes pinning mine, and his cigarette lifted and fell on his lips as he chewed the end."You have no idea how hard it is to get a job and a place to stay without a social security card or any history that proves you were alive before a few weeks ago. Ray found me a halfway house, and it took me two of the three weeks I've been alive to land this job, so don't get me fired."
"I—" My words croaked, and I didn't even know what they would have been.
Kearo was just going on like everything was normal, like he hadn't died in my arms, and like I wasn't desperate to feel his hands against my face just to know this wasn't a dream worse than any I'd ever had. All I wanted was for him to touch my cheek like he always did and smile, but he was glued a yard away from me to a parking barrier.
"You're not... gone." I chose to avoid the word dead.
"No, I suppose not," Kearo said more to the ground than to me. "I think I was, for a bit, but fate has a fun way of torturing people." Silence stretched on between us, and I clenched my hands with frustration.
"You want to elaborate?" I half demanded, and the amusement flicking up Kearo's lips renewed my tears.
"If you insist." Kearo devoured his cigarette and slipped another on his lips. "The dream world collapsed from the outside in, and as its destroyer, I was the last man standing. I was pulled into that vortex of power, that final scream of humanity's dreams as they fought for their existence, and just as I thought my end was upon me, everything fell to silence. I found myself on my knees in that empty room with no beginning or end, in the face of a marvel of technology that had created and destroyed so much, and a voice called out.
"'Do you have a dream?' it asked.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Word Count: 1492
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
