Electrical Storm

“I can’t sleep.” 

Nothing from Colin except a snort of soft air from the other side of the bed. There was a rumble from outside, and it took her a moment to categorize it - distant thunder.

Emma rolled over, her face illuminated by the red numbers staring back at her: 4:34. Crap.

“I can’t sleep,” she said a bit louder. Colin’s breathing didn’t change. He was still in his own dreams.

Dream. Yes. A dream. What dream? Hers? She wasn’t even sure she had been asleep. Most of the night, it had felt like she had tossed and turned. Maybe she had dozed off just enough to dream. 

She closed her eyes, hoping to fall asleep. They opened again, and the clock told her it was now 4:35. Crap.

This wasn’t working. She slid smoothly out from under the covers to avoid waking Colin. Let him have his dreams. She slipped to the door. A stack of unpacked boxes took up the wall space to the side of the door. The latch made a slight snick as she closed the door behind her.

More boxes in the short hallway led past the spare bedroom packed with additional boxes. She only saw boxes marked “Office.” The idea that the spare room would be an office amused her. She wasn’t sure what “office” stuff Colin might try to do there, but he had his dreams that involved working for himself. How your average manager was going to start a new career from home was a detail that he was reluctant to share because, and she knew this for a fact, he didn’t have that detail sorted out. 

Somewhere among all of the boxes they had moved into the house throughout yesterday, there were two boxes marked with just her name. No future dreams were written in black marker on the side. No room was assigned to them.

Downstairs in the kitchen, she debated whether or not to make coffee. The smell would wake Colin, and she needed a little time alone. So, no coffee.

She sat at the small, battered table shoved against the wall in one corner, staring at the wall. The pre-dawn gloom suited her thoughts, which were still fogged over like an early morning drive through a valley. Shapes presented themselves here and there in the shadow of her thoughts, but they were ill-defined and too vague to name with any certainty. 

She noticed a piece of the wallpaper had curled away from the seam. She tried to think if she had seen this before but couldn’t shake the idea that it wasn’t like that a moment ago. The paper that covered the kitchen’s four walls was simple, beige with small flowers and a green vine as if the flowers were all part of the same, room-filling plant. 

She found that she had managed to grasp the edge of the curled paper and had pulled it back. It had peeled back for at least two inches. She didn’t remember reaching out, grasping the paper, or pulling on it. The dingy paper had given way to a peek of gold. The color brought something powerful with it. A feeling of… and it was gone as completely as a forgotten dream.

She tugged and pulled back more, which brought a burst of emotion, like biting into a grape, a tension until it popped. And then it was there, full and unmistakable. She saw a pattern mixed with the gold color. She touched the newly exposed paper, so clean that it could have been hung the day before. 

In her mind, she saw that paper filling a room. Golden yellow with an audacious floral pattern, as if the artist dared you to think about anything but yellow flowers.

She pulled, and the superficial paper peeled away without a sound, as if its fibers had been soaked through and were just waiting to fall apart in her hands. She pulled again. More slid off as if the wall was molting. Within seconds, she had a whole section of the paper pulled down, a pile of beige skin on the floor below a field of golden flowers. She stared at the exposed wall and tried to catch her breath, stunned by what she saw.

She tried to convince herself this was one of those weird coincidences that life threw at you, like meeting someone far away and, after only a few moments of chatting, realizing that they had a relative that went to your old school. Surely, this was that kind of a coincidence.

Why else would the exact wallpaper that had hung in her grandmother’s kitchen be here in this place? She hadn’t been in that house since her grandmother had passed when Emma had just hit her teenage years. That kitchen had been built a century ago.

This house wasn’t more than twenty years old.

She attacked the next section of the wall with renewed vigor. Pieces of the beige paper fluttered down around her like desaturated butterflies. The exposed paper gave the kitchen a golden glow that grew the more she worked. 

There was a murmur, and Emma cocked her head to try to hear what it said, but it was fruitless, and she couldn’t even tell where the whisper of sound had come from. It was lilting, skipping across her ability to hear like a fawn skittering across thin ice.

And then the patch of red appeared.

At first, Emma didn’t notice. It was behind her as if merely a smudge on a pair of glasses. It was formless and slid across the room on a breeze that Emma couldn’t sense. Its movement finally caught her eye. She looked at the smear of red that hung like mist in the room. It glided over to the stove, next to a wall oven that hadn’t been in her house. A small fridge with a bright handle on a latch was in the far corner.

Emma realized that this was no longer her kitchen. She had been in this kitchen, or, more accurately, a kitchen three states away in a small farmhouse once occupied by her grandparents.

The shape rounded out, and Emma saw plump calves shuffle to the side. The red smear became solid. It was a housedress. How could she not know that until now? That was the only thing it could be. A shock of thin, permed gray hair hovered above it all.

The murmur took form at the same pace as the figure before her, and she recognized the tune. She had long since forgotten its name but knew it nonetheless. She knew it because she had caught herself humming or whistling it in moments of absentmindedness. Even Colin once asked her what that tune was, and she was startled to realize she had no idea what it was called. Or where she had heard it. And when she tried to replicate it, she found she couldn’t. 

It had disappeared like a dream upon waking.

Emma hummed along with the nameless tune. Perhaps, she realized, it was nameless because the tune had never been given a name by the woman who had created it while busying herself in her kitchen.

Emma could not remember much about her grandmother; she mostly remembered the round lady moving around the golden kitchen, flanked by the flowers printed on the wallpaper. The woman across the room dusted flour from her hands on the apron (more golden yellow). She looked over her shoulder at Emma and smiled.

“You want to get me four eggs, buttercup,” the woman said.

Buttercup. Emma smiled. How had she forgotten that nickname?

Emma found herself at the old fridge and pulled on the latch. The heavy door swung open, and a moment later, she had four eggs in her outstretched hands. Her grandmother took them, palming one in her hand and acting like she would crack it over Emma’s head. Emma giggled.

My God, she thought. Where had that come from?

Her grandma smiled and turned to the mixing bowl, splitting the four eggs and depositing them into the bowl in a flash, the halved shells tossed into a bucket in the corner that, Emma knew, would be taken out by her grandfather before they turned in for the night to be dumped over the back fence. 

“How is school going?” the woman asked.

Emma opened her mouth to say she hadn’t been in school for years. 

“Okay,” she said instead.

Grandma chuckled. “That’s what you always say. How is it really going?” She motioned around the empty room with a wooden spoon. “Just us girls. Spill ‘em.”

Emma didn’t know what to say. 

“Got plans?” her grandma asked as if Emma had fully answered the previous question. She plopped cookie dough down onto a baking sheet.

Again, Emma opened her mouth to say there was a new job quickly becoming just the job as the newness faded into the past. She wasn’t very proud that the word “assistant” was a prominent part of her job title, but it was a place to start. 

“Yeah. Of course,” she answered. “I got into the choir.” Emma was confused by her answer. Choir? That had been, she had to think, in seventh grade. 

“Well, that’s a start. Then what?” Grandma asked, her back now to Emma as the bent and darkened baking sheet slid into the oven.

Emma ran a long finger around the inside of the mixing bowl and brought out a glob of dough. It was gone and swallowed before her grandmother turned back around. But the woman knew. She always did. And she always smiled at the shared indiscretion.

Emma shrugged. “I want to do show choir in high school. And they do musicals, too.”

“And then musicals in college. And then Broadway,” her grandmother announced. She fixed Emma with a serious look. “And I expect free tickets. Front row and center. I won’t settle for anything less.”

Emma laughed, just as she had more than twenty years ago.

“So what happened?” the other woman asked.

“Huh?” Emma straightened up at the change in tone from the woman who was, to Emma’s knowledge, still buried three states away.

“Where is the music now? You don’t even own a piano,” she noted.

“Piano was never really my forte,” Emma tried to explain, but her grandmother only shook her head, and Emma’s words fell flat in her ears. No, the piano would never be her ticket, but it was necessary to learn the tunes and practice.

“Who told you?” the older one asked. She was bent over again, and this time, the baking sheet was extracted from the oven that wasn’t supposed to be in this house, and clattered onto the stovetop. The room swelled with the smell of the cookies, and Emma worried that Colin would wake up to that smell just as sure as he would have been up at the first sniff of freshly brewed coffee.

“Told me what?” Emma asked.

“That you shouldn’t do it. You had the loveliest voice I ever heard, buttercup. I could listen to you for hours. Such passion that came out of you every time you sang. Gave me goose pimples,” her grandmother said, a sadness seeping into her voice. “So, who told you?”

“No one,” Emma said. And that was, technically, true. And the look her grandmother gave her indicated the wise woman knew that wasn’t the whole truth. “No one. Just…”

“Everyone,” her grandmother finished. “Even Colin?”

Emma raised an eyebrow at this. Grandmother had never met Emma’s husband since it had been almost ten years after her burial that Emma had even met him. Still…

“No. He doesn’t even know what I wanted to do.”

“That early, eh? A little doubt here? A little worry there? They asked how you would support yourself.”

Emma nodded.

“Told you the odds of making it.”

Another nod.

“Said you should have something to fall back on.”

Emma didn’t have to nod. Her grandmother had hit the nails, all of them, right on the head. 

A plate appeared on the table, and Emma was seated in a chair. Grandmother took a seat and held up a cookie.

“So you gave up your dream.”

Emma opened her mouth to defend herself, but a hand came up and stopped her.

“That happens. But what dream did you replace it with? Yours? Or are you dreaming someone else’s dream?”

Emma stared at her cookie for a long time.

Something beeped. And beeped.

She looked around and saw she was alone. The golden glow of the kitchen that harkened to those perfect afternoons in her grandmother’s kitchen faded. Became beige, plain, and unremarkable, like an assistant hoping to be the real thing someday.

Emma looked and saw the wall in front of her was filled with small flowers.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Emma sat up in bed. Colin snorted harder this time and almost woke up.

Emma turned her head left and right. Not a clock alarm. A car alarm. Someone was already awake nearby and had set off their car alarm.

But it was enough to wake her up. She looked around the bedroom as the first rays of a gray and feeble light slipped around the edges of the curtain. Why did she expect to see a golden glow? She sniffed at the air, expecting…what? Nothing was there except the smell of a strange house that would, over time, either smell like them or they would smell like it.

She laid back down, trying to remember what she had been dreaming. It had been so real. So there. After a moment, she began to hum a nameless tune. She had cycled through it twice before she realized what she was doing. Where did that come from? She racked her brain for an idea of the origin of the tune. She could sing at times, but only when she was alone. Had she ever sung when Colin was with her? Maybe once shortly after they had first met. But that hadn’t gone over well, and she hadn’t done it since then.

“Are you dreaming someone else’s dream?” The voice lingered in her mind. 

Emma shook her head and got out of bed. Colin made a questioning noise, and Emma told him to go back to sleep.

She padded down the stairs and went to the small living room at the front of the house. 

Emma didn’t hear the footsteps coming down the stairs ten minutes later. She was moving another box out of the way. She was almost to the wall now, and her boxes, marked with her name and no dreams attached, had to be here.

“Hey,” Colin mumbled.

Emma didn’t answer. 

“What are you up to?” he asked as he shuffled for the kitchen.

“I want to find my boxes. I was dreaming… thinking about something in them. That’s all.”

Colin gave her a perfunctory “uh-huh” and turned the corner into the kitchen.

Emma saw a box with her name and pulled it out, unaware of the question Colin asked her from the kitchen. Probably asking if she wanted a cup of coffee.

“Hun?” Colin asked a little louder.

Emma flipped through the box and smiled when she found what she had hoped was there. She pulled the thin booklet out, noting that a half dozen others were still wedged into the box, and held it up.

“Emma,” Colin said with a little more force. “Did you see this?”

Emma got to her feet, went to the kitchen, and stopped next to her husband as she saw what he was talking about. She stared at the far wall of the kitchen where the wallpaper had peeled back to expose another layer below it. Gold with flowers and a green vine.

“What’s this?” Colin asked and tried to pull the booklet of Broadway show tunes from her hand. She only tightened her grip on it. She would be damned if she was going to let someone, even Colin, take this away from her.

“My dream,” she said.