Secrets & Nightmares

   I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. I had no idea what time of night it was but I remember the first thing I felt was his breath on my hair. It was warm and soft. He never snored. I knew that because I was very sensitive to sounds and I would have woken up if he was. When I felt his breathing I was relieved, because I wasn’t in the world of the nightmare anymore but on the real one, the one that recently had been very nice to me in many aspects.

 Some people say that if you are successful or happy is because you deserve it or because you have worked hard for it. I think it’s a combination of the two., mainly because I don’t believe in the concept of fighting for everything in life. People who believe that are the type of people that are very competitive and that don’t stop at nothing to get what they want, they believe everything in life is a competition and that’s simply not the way it is or at least not my life.

 Anyhow, I was glad right then that I didn’t woke him up, because I knew he had problems sleeping and didn’t wanted to be the one to disrupt his night. I decided to try and close my eyes again and slip away into a deep slumber, hopefully without dreams. But, again, I fell right into a nightmare, a horrible world filled with the worst creatures I have ever seen, with all my fears parading around, rubbing past mistakes or their simple existence in my face. I had to wake up once again, this time really drenched in sweat.

 Thankfully, he had moved a bit away from me so I just separated my body from his slowly and went to the bathroom, to wash my face with cold water and try to relax a bit. I tried sitting on the toilet, pissing, even going to the kitchen and grab a bite. I also did some simple exercises in the living room and saw possibly five minutes of a TV show I didn’t even like. When I was back into bed, he woke up and asked me, between asleep and angry, where I had been?

 I kissed him in the lips, which made us both very happy and laid there with him. He fell asleep very fast and I stayed up for a long while, in fact not sleeping again for the rest of the morning. At that moment I did check my cellphone and saw it was five in the morning. We had to wake up in three hours and I couldn’t do one more of sleeping. I just used that time to think about it all, checking in my mind if everything was ready and found myself shaking a bit and my stomach growling.

 I grabbed his hand, which he had put over my chest, and squeezed it softly. He tightened his grip on me and I liked that. I felt safe and I guess that’s what I needed to feel.  If the alarm hadn’t gone off in that moment, I think I would’ve slept a bit. But I didn’t.

 The first thing he did when he woke up was kissing me, and then we showered together, hugging a lot and almost dancing beneath the water, When we were finished, we dressed up in silence and went to the kitchen to have breakfast. We both had cereal and talked a bit over it. He noticed I hadn’t sleep and I had to convince him I was ok, only a bit anxious about our day and that he shouldn’t worry. It was clear he was already worried but he didn’t go on with the subject, he just said he had to be at his sister’s in an hour.

 When he left, I cleaned up the place, changing the sheets of the bed to new ones I had bought secretly. I also pulled out some scented candles from a shopping bag I’d hidden beneath the sink, as well as other products that we would use for other purposes. When it was all ready I grabbed my kiss, gave the place one last look and went out the door. I had no car so I decided to walk to my mother’s house, which was an hour away by walking but I had the time.

 He had left before me because he said his sister could handle everything and that we shouldn’t do anything else than just show up at the right time. He was going to her place because that was the closest relative he had alive. His parents had died several years ago and since then his sister had been everything. She was a very organized person and had proposed to help us because she knew that the event needed a woman’s touch to be just perfect.

  As I walked to my former home, I thought about it all. I was nervous, obviously, but I knew the nightmares had been produced by something else. It wasn’t fear that had put them in my mind; it was something else that I didn’t quite understand. I mean, as everyone in the world, I have secrets and thing I wouldn’t like every single person to know, but that had never given me nightmares so what was this all about?

 I used my walk home to think about everything that would happen that day and I realized I was entitled to feel worried and maybe being a little bit scared. Marriage was not someone that I did everyday and it had been a question of “When?” for a long time and that time had finally come. I was sure about my affirmative response to it because I loved him dearly, beyond anything I had ever dreamed of. He was my prince charming and my bad boy, all in one. How corny does that sound?

 Thinking about him made me smile and many people on the street smiled me back. I didn’t noticed for a while but when I did I just laughed and thought that being in love was not as people described it but that it was good if you were ready for the long haul.

 In my mom’s house, my parents were dressing up, as well as my sister and her husband who had just arrived from abroad with their baby. She would have loved to have him carry the rings but he was still too young for that. Instead, my future husband’s youngest cousin was up for the job. She was a very nice girl and a bit mad for a seven year old, so she was right up our alley.  I also changed in a matter of minutes and decided to just wait in the living room for everyone to be ready.

 I dozed off and entered, once again, the dark territory of my nightmares. I recognized the feeling and the images and I could even feel my body sweat. I was in darkness, only able to see a light very far in the distance and the only thing I could do was walk towards it. Trying to grab it. But every single step I took was filled with pain, as if spines or small knives entered my every limb. Besides, and this was the most awful part, I felt hands in the darkness touching me, grabbing me to a place below that seemed liquid in nature. I knew that if I were pulled down there, I would die. And then, as always, I woke up before my head was submerged.

 My dad noticed when I woke up, because apparently I had let out a scream. He said that the best way not to dream bad things was either not to sleep or trying to make sense of whatever the dreams were about. I know my father wasn’t into Freud or anything, he just thought that if something was bothering it would translate into annoying nightmares and it was. I knew that was the case. Bu t it wasn’t just easy, it wasn’t just about letting the air out. It was harder than that.

 When everyone was finally ready, we jumped into the family car and drove towards the venue, a small banquet hall not far from there. When we arrived, every single guest was already there and I could notice he had already arrived too. So I was the one who had to go second, as per the rules. They started right away with the music. Then his sister escorted him to the altar, then me by my mother. I when I see him, my body let out one single tear. I say that because I had no control over it.

 The notary started talking about the law and citing many aspects of marriage that he found funny but also very important, so that the audience and us took it into account. He told us it was a very important thing to sign a paper and say “I choose to live my life with this person”, and that he personally admired those who did. We signed, me crying more and more, and finally kissed to the cheering and joy of our families and friends. As we kissed, I realized it was time, so covered by the wall of sound I whispered in his ear, took him by the hand and walk the carpet back into the main hall were food was being served.

 We didn’t discuss it until after the party, that went on for quite a while. He liked the candles in our room and the new sheets but he went straight to my confession as we sat down in the bed. I started crying and he held me, in love with me. He told me that he would do whatever I wanted, whatever made me happy. I smiled at him and then told him, clumsily, that I really needed to know where my only son was and what he was like. He grabbed my hand and kissed me.

Home

   The place had been abandoned for a long time, or at least that’s what could be inferred by the state of the house as a whole. Some glasses had broken, due to the wind or objects hitting them with strong force, moss and fungi had grown in the most humid places and every single object was covered by a very thick layer of dust, except the things near the terrace, through which the rain and the wind of many days had entered and sort of cleaned the space a bit. It didn’t look better as there was a lot of sand from the beach below and fragments of plants and other things. The place was a mess but there was some magic to it even like that.

 Formerly, that house had been part of condominium where only the richest people had houses by the beach, places where they could escape if they needed so. Maybe they had very busy lives in the city or maybe they just wanted to change views from time to time. There were even houses that were visited only once. But the one described was the last one of them all. The others were in ruins: they had been affected by the cliff crumbling into the beach or had just had less luck than the house that still stood there, almost defiantly.

 There were pictures of the people that used to live there or at least own the place: most of the photos showed a couple in their fifties, smiling or hugging and one where they kissed in some sort of celebration. There was only one picture of other people, most likely their children but it could be anyone as humidity had taken its toll on the picture and faces could not really be compared to the others. The point was that it seemed to be the house of people that were probably retired and had decided to have a place far from the chaos of the cities.

 The largest room was the living room, with the dining table just adjacent to it in a sort of platform that made way to the balcony, that had gone unaffected by the disaster that had claimed so many of the other houses. If a person could have been there, they would have seen a fiery ocean outside, a possible storm forming in the horizon and little to no wildlife in the vicinity. In the house, there were some small rodents and insects but no big animals, something had scared them off, or maybe the lack of people was unappealing, maybe they had learned to deal with us.

 Everything in this room was obviously expensive and that was obvious because of how it had stood against the wind and the humidity. The wood used all over the place was obviously of high quality as was the steel by the fireplace and even the fabrics in the furniture. The couple had probably spent lots of days planning what to buy and how to install it inside, how would it look best.

 But now, no one was there. Same for the bedrooms, which the house had three. The biggest one, of course, was the master bedroom that also had a balcony but smaller. The couple probably loved to look at the ocean every morning and talked about that view often. Or maybe, as many humans do, they never acknowledged their privilege, because when people already have something they’ve yearned for long, they decided to move on to some other things and the magic that used to exist is just lost. People are very hard to please.

 The bed and linen smelled awful but that was caused by the broken windows and the fact that rain had somehow created a giant puddle beneath the bed. It was almost a death trap because beneath that puddle laid all the pieces of broken glass from the windows. A human would have to be very careful walking around that room, as large as it was. There was a sofa there and a TV that had stopped working some time ago (there was no electricity) and a very large bathroom inside.

 It had a circular bathtub by the window overlooking the ocean and a lot of space for clothes and to be naked around. It should have been a really nice place to hang out as a couple or even alone. The glasses here had not been shattered yet so the room seemed less chaotic than the rest. The drawers were still filled with things the woman that lived there had bought but rarely used: many types of creams and lotions, bath salts for the bathtub, soaps in every shape, form and odor and several other things that would make a hotel manager blush out of embarrassment.

 The other two rooms were smaller. The one across the master bedroom was a bit larger and its windows were also shattered. It looked towards the entrance, were the cars would have been parked. It didn’t really have anything personal around except a teddy bear that was still sitting on the bed. It was impossible to know who had been the owner of that bear: there were no pictures in the bedroom and there were no other objects to relate it to. And the whole place was done in white, so one it was probably not a child’s toy but who knows, maybe it was.

 The last bedroom was smaller, also overlooking the parking area. That room’s particularity was the fact that it had a rather old computer on a table on the opposite side of the bed. There was a calendar besides it and a small cactus that was the only living thing in the room. It was strange to see that patch of green next to all the rather dull colors of the rooms. It was, without a doubt, a sign of life. But no one was really there to appreciate it anymore. There was even a small pink flower on top of it, but no one would ever see that. No way to know if they did before.

 Suddenly, the room shook as if another tremor had occurred but the force that was shaking the house did not come from below but from above. From the small bedroom, something could be seen in the sky, sort of a shadow slowly moving among the clouds but making the ground shake a lot. It was very high up and its shape or trajectory was very difficult to pin down. After a few moments the vibrations stop and only the sound of one of the paintings in the living room falling to the ground broke the silence. It had held on to the wall as long as it had been able to but the forces of nature had finally won.

 The last space in the house was the kitchen, which appeared to have been frozen in time. Everything there was just as if someone had come and clean it everyday since the couple had left the house. The pans and pots were very still in their places, also the glasses of wine and the entire silverware. It looked ready to be used but no one would ever use any of it again. It was nice to imagine what they had cooked in such a great place, such a clean and white space. Maybe they had thrown parties with lots of canapés and alcohol. Maybe they had been more intimate, and had just cooked meals for the two of them.

 It was weird not to see any grease of any part of the kitchen and the fact that there was no fungus in there but other parts of the house were just invaded by it. Maybe one of them was very into cleaning or had a special love for cooking. That was also interesting. Imagining who they actually were, what had made them laugh in that kitchen, what shows they liked to watch on TV, if they had eaten many times only the two of us in that dining table or if they had spent many nights feeling the night air in their faces and just looking at the ocean.

 The same ocean that now seemed a bit gray and that, strangely, was slowly pulling back. The few birds that remained it the bitch went away and there was only the house to face the destiny that had been set for the world. That house had known love, hope and laughter but also sadness and anger. It had been a house were some humans had decided to live and enjoy their time together but they had been made to leave and cut short what was going to be a long stay. They probably planned a proper life there.

 The ocean was coming back, tall and monstrous. The house, and many other houses inland and far from there, where going to disappear. And with them the memories of thousands, maybe millions of people which only dream was to have a place to go back to when things got unbearable, where they could be with the people they loved and just enjoy the simplicity of human life. But that was no more. That time in that place, came to an end in a moment.

War there, peace here

   The park slowly fell into disuse. First, because it was all the way up the hill, something that had been a prime feature of the place but later was seen as just a silly way to make people pay more money for just some rides that they could easily find somewhere else. The rollercoaster, the ferris wheel, the bumpers cars and all those stands where you could get food and silly prizes were still there fifty years later but in a very different state.

 The city had wanted to dismantle the park but it would have been really expensive and it wasn’t a very rich area to pay for anything that big so they decided to send a team of experts to define if the park was safe as it was or if it had to be demolished, at least partially.

 It was a team of only three people that checked every single machine and structure for a period of five days. They used special devices to help them and took pictures. They were very noticeable in town because it wasn’t a very big city and people knew each other really well. It wasn’t a secret that most people believe the park should be left alone, as it had memories for many of the inhabitants of town but also because it was a very obvious and unique feature of town to have the park overlooking them from a hill. It was something like out of a movie.

 By the end of their studies, the team agreed the park was safe and that only some parts of the rollercoaster should be either demolished or repaired in order to avoid a future collapse. What surprised everyone was that the city council did nothing with the study and decided to file everything concerning the park. As they saw it, it was a place that was out of bounds, so if something collapsed no one would be hurt. After all, a perimeter fence had been built around the park many years ago and they could still manage to electrify it in order to keep out any intruders.

 The citizens were not very happy about this, as it would mean that a portion of the city’s electricity would go to a place no one cared about anymore. Some people presented their complaints but nothing happened. So the subject was left alone for a long time and people eventually forgot about the danger the study had shown, the electrified fence and so many other details that the council had omitted about the park.

 In the period of time that followed, the park was only seen as a feature of the city, like the rest of the hills and the forest to one side and the lake to the other. It was just something that was there and that no one really cared about a lot. It was ten years later, when young people, who didn’t know anything about the park and all that had happened with it, decided to are each other to cross the fence and get into the park. No one really knows why that came up but it did.

 They weren’t surprised when the first boy started climbing the fence and wasn’t electrocuted. Inadvertently, they had been the first people to realize that the perimeter fence of the park had not been electrified in many years. Actually, it had only been like that for a few months until the city dropped it. However, the townsfolk were never notified so they still thought safety was paramount among the rulers of the town.

 The kids loved to enter the park and eventually someone brought a pair of industrial cutters and made a whole on the fence in order for everyone to come in and just play around. Important to say they were just children and young adults, the oldest been twenty-five years old. The young ones liked to go around and destroy what could be destroyed, as well as use the former walkways as places to play baseball, pee and practice their shooting with toy guns. In the summer, they changed that to water guns.

 Meanwhile, the older new visitors went all the way up there to have beer and smoke cigarettes or marihuana. There was no place in town to do any of that without someone’s parents been aware of them so it was like a gold mine when they realized no one was looking at them in the park. Many got really drunk and passed out but friends would always help the guy or girl in trouble: they would help the person eat something, vomit as much as they needed to and then help them go home and say they had been food poisoned.

 Surprisingly, parents were very slow to understand what was happening and there’s no way to blame them as the country had entered another war in a far away land and many of the sons of the town had decided to go and defend the honor of their land. The truth behind this was that unemployment was rampant, which combined by the very traditional values of the region, made for a large part of the population supporting that war and being very proud that their children were participating in it.

 When they began to be killed, pride mutated into despair and worry and the fact that kids were smoking and drinking and playing in a dangerous place, was not really an important thing in the parent’s lives. They wanted to win that war but also see their boys, and in some cases girls, come back. The first coffins arrived only five months after the war had started.

 The perpetual state of mourning and overused patriotism was the perfect veil the younger kids needed to go to the park in the hill and just get away from their parents who spent every second of their day putting flags in every corner of the house or watching TV, usually the most fanatic TV station ever.

 They’d rather be shooting their toy guns to the roller coaster’s pillars or from the lower seats in the ferris wheel. It was amazing how the ambiance changed from the town square to the hill park. In the hill everyone laughed and ran and you could always pick up some gossip from the girl that sat in the benches to talk about their schoolmates. Even pets were allowed now as kids brought their dogs and other animals for their classmates and friends to meet.

 The truth is the place had become a kind of haven for children that were ignored at home. If the parents weren’t there for them, their friends would be. Many became friends after meeting in the park and many fell in love there too, initiating many relationships that would last for years and years, although kids had no idea of this.

 Even things as forbidden as two boys kissing was normal in their little world up in the hill, no one said anything to the boys that did it because there was an unspoken agreement that no one would judge anyone for anything they did, unless it was pretty violent or just wrong. For example, a group of kids saved a girl from being raped by some guy in one of the bumper cars and they decided to form some sort of security group, telling others to be aware of their surroundings at all time.

 Life was good for those kids and teenagers. And it was just like that for some years until an accident happened, the one that eventually was set to happen: the rollercoaster collapsed and killed two children and destroyed part of the fence and toppled trees that were located down the hill. As everyone in town was able to see the tragedy, no one was able to ignore reality anymore.

 Parents grieved now for the kids they had at home and realized what the city had done to them. Lawsuits ensued and media frenzy was created, as people loved all the drama and the tragedy behind this story.

Meanwhile, kids mourned their dead too and mourned the loss of the only place they had to be themselves, to enjoy being young in a world were adults were crazy enough to praise children going to war. The ones in the park talked about the subject often and thought all their parents were insane, even if none of them had said that to them ever.

After the tragedy, the town went back to worrying about those who had left willingly to die. But kids wouldn’t take it anymore. It all started with a twelve year old grabbing all the national flags in the house, piling ALL of them and burning them at the backyard. War had come home.

The frozen forest

   Blood slowly dripped from the top of the tallest tree surrounding the clearing. It glistened again the moonlight and didn’t stop until it hit the frozen forest soil. Something had happened up there, something that no creature in the forest was willing to explain or understand. The blood on the tree froze and remained there forever, working as reminder to every single creature to be very careful on this part of the world.

 A long time after that, a woman dedicated to washing the clothes of others got lost in the forest. She had been washing sheets and dirty underwear in the cold water of the river but she had lost her way because of the snow, that had begun to fall very slowly, changing every single aspect of the forest in the process.

 Unknown to the woman, she was being watched by various creatures but not because they wanted her out of because they feared her. They just wanted her to leave forever and never return. They knew that the frozen trail of blood on the tallest tree was from human origin and that, in simple words, meant that humans were better off very far from the forest.

 However, the laundry lady had gotten lost. She was not a young woman, rather having a lot of experience in what she did, as she had been doing it for the past thirty years, at least. It had been her mother who taught her everything “ a woman should know”. And she learned everything because women could learn so little that it was better for her to get every piece of information available, instead of suffering for what wasn’t true.

 She had dreamed, long ago, to marry a handsome man and have beautiful children and leave the rest of her days as the best housewife in town. Her little corner of the world was so peaceful and small, that she never thought thinking what she thought was asking too much. After all, every other girl had exactly the same luck, with various results but at least they got to have a proper family.

 Her name was Irene, after her mother, and no one had ever asked her to marry. She knew she wasn’t the prettiest girl in town but she was one of few girls available. And, as uncommon as it was, there were more single men in town than single women. And even so, she remained a spinster for the rest of her life. As old as she was now, she knew she wasn’t going to have any chance of having the life she had always wanted. Instead, she found herself a nice little cottage and people came over to leave their dirty laundry for her to wash. It was a simple and sad life.

 When she got lost, she didn’t really got scared. Her life was so full of the same always, that a little bit of excitement wasn’t unwelcomed. Irene had a big bag on her back, carrying everything she had been washing and realized she needed to head back fast or frost will begin to form on the wet parts of the sheets and defrosting them would be even harder inside of her house. She used her chimney fire to dry the clothes and other items but if frost was involved, it would take much longer and the payment would also take longer to reach her.

 She walked and walked, first with no worry but as the sun began to fold, she accelerated her steps. Suddenly, Irene arrived to the clearing were the tall tree stood but because of the snow, she didn’t notice the frozen blood or the large amount of birds watching her from above. She stopped walking and started yelling “Hello!” to no avail. The truth was, and she had no way of knowing it, that she had walked farther and farther away from town instead of getting closer to it.

 No one ever reached the clearing, not even in the summer. It was a private place the forest revealed only in special occasions and, apparently, Irene was special enough to get there. But that, somehow, wasn’t a good thing. Snow was pilling up and the forest was slowly getting darker. The woman, now desperate, turned around and ran into the forest but it was too late. The trees had suddenly decided to be closer that they had been before, so walking between them was now very difficult. The lack of light made it hard for Irene to see that she was slowly making a circle.

 After a while, she got back into the clearing and it was then when she dropped her bag, fell to her knees and started to cry and to beg for help. She yelled and cried very loudly in order to be heard and she actually managed to do that but that person, a hunter returning home, confused her voice with the sounds in the wind. To put it simply, he thought he had been too long out in the woods and that he needed food and the warmth of his home and family.

 Irene stopped yelling, she also stopped punching the frozen soil, which made her hands hurt because it was like punching steel. She cried but it hurt too badly so she stopped fast. She looked around and realized that, despite being night, there was some kind of light illuminating the clearing. She looked everywhere for the source and realized someone was coming. She stood up fast, thinking help was on the way.

 But it wasn’t a helping hand. It was a figure wearing a cloak, revealing no human attributes except the shape. It didn’t seem to be walking like normal people did, instead floating around, as it happened to be some sort of ghost. Irene’s hope vanished and tried to get back to the forest but everything behind her was black, she couldn’t see trees or anything else. There appeared to be a very black wall there and she just couldn’t run anywhere. Anyway, her feet were unresponsive and once she tried to walk, she fell to the ground.

 The figure then stood in front of her and appeared to wait there. It was unclear what it was waiting for, if it needed Irene to speak first or if it was there for other matters and was completely ignoring the fact that Irene was there.

 Then, the creature started to transform. It grew a bit larger and Irene could see feet and hand emerge from the bright cloak that had been floating in front of her before. As the feet touched the ground, the hands pulled back the cloak’s hood and revealed the head of a woman. In appearance, it did look like a woman but she wasn’t like Irene. The laundry lady was older, had pale skin and blue eyes. She was taller than many women and her nose was bigger too.

 The figure, or rather, the woman beneath the cloak, was smaller even as it had grown larger, had bronze skin and big hazelnut eyes. Her skin seemed to be really soft and her ears and nose were very delicate. She looked patiently at Irene, and then spoke.

      - You are alone. – She said.

Irene started crying again, but this time she didn’t care about how much it hurt to do that in a frozen forest. Slowly, she nodded to accept the spirit’s statement. She then noticed the women that had appeared before her had some sort of drawing on her faces, very subtle and beautiful.

      - You don’t have to.

And she raised one hand and offered it to Irene. The villager had no idea what to do. Something, a voice in her head, told her to hold that hand. But her inner voice, the one that was actually hers, was afraid of what might happen. She was afraid that this apparition had something to do with death and, she had known this for a while, she wasn’t ready to die.

      - I’m not ready to die.

It escaped her lips as she had thought about it. Surprisingly, the spirit kept its hand stretched towards Irene and, suddenly, she smiled. And then Irene’s hand just decided, almost by itself, to grab the hand of the spirit. Then it was all engulfed in white light and the older woman thought her moment had finally come.

 But that wasn’t the case. Irene was again at the edge of the river and it was still day. The sheets were on the bag and she had to get going. She could see the smoke of a house and knew that was the way towards the town. As she walked to her home, she wondered about the spirit and asked herself if she had dreamt the whole thing. It was only when she got home and found a person knocking on her door, that she realized she hadn’t dreamt anything.

 The girl with hazelnut eyes, bronze skin and beautiful nose, was knocking on her door.