Vivid Memories and Forlorn Dreams

The most vivid among my memories are those of my hometown in Waxhill County, West Virginia. Worn asphalt and cracking pavement outlined the weary brick structures and weary business fronts. A single neighborhood housed most residents, with the remaining dispersed across dozens of square miles of cedar and pinewood forests.

Few walked into town, and fewer still walked out of it. People assigned any task or errand they couldn't finish in the town center to a weekend chore—this meant driving or taking a bus south toward Abraham, a place barely qualified as a city..

“Hey, Young. You with me?” the voice tested, fading back into my consciousness. I blinked a few times as the man across from me, Dr. Krauss, returned to reality. My chapped hands rubbed at my eyelids as I tried to regain focus.

When I turned 17, I left for Abraham with a girl I had fallen for less than a year prior. Why she had left the city to come to Yickwick the night we met is beyond me. In a night of passionate mistakes, we found ourselves in the predicament of under-prepared, expecting parents.

As I prepared myself for life in the city, we lost the child, and I lost her—but I moved‌ to the very condominium she had inherited from her deceased parents. I tried desperately for years to build a life there, without her and our unborn child, and found middling success. I struggled, sure, but I thought what I had was easy compared to most folk of Abraham and Yickwick, and I kept my thoughts locked within my head.

“Young?” Dr. Krauss prompted again.

“Sorry—uh. Yeah, yeah. I just… I lost focus for a second there, Dr. Krauss.” I responded wearily.

“Ah,” he replied with a tongue click before finishing his thought, “Why don’t… how about we call it for today? You have a shift at the factory tonight, don’t you?”

I do, and you pointing out you logged it away doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable with you, with this. Fucking therapy. What I said out loud to Dr. Krauss was far more tame.

“Sure, doc. I’m uh—I’m sorry. I think. You know, today wasn’t more productive.” But I wasn’t sorry. I was letting my thoughts wander. Isn’t that what therapy is for?

The night I met Ramona was anything but usual. That Friday, our school had let out, and I wandered the streets and abandoned campgrounds on the outskirts of Yickwick with some friends. The abandonment of Lake Longhorn years ago left the nearby recreational lake isolated and barely graded for swimming and other youth-suited activities.

Still, it also meant that the fish stock had long dried up, rendering it useless for fishing. Naturally, the town's sixty-ish school-aged children turned a secluded cove into a fairground safe from the purview of our parents. Never before that night had someone from out of town shown their face at our usual Friday evening ruckus.

To say Ramona drew all the attention toward her would be an understatement: not only did all the human eyes become entranced and confused by her presence, but the peaks of the evergreen trees bent with the breeze to wave in her direction, and the smoke from the fires pulled toward her unnaturally and uneasily. Mother Nature demanded attention for Ramona, and Ramona desperately wished to escape it. I, out of luck or coincidence, was her out.

While several of the girls and boys surrounded her and pelted her with questions and somewhat demeaning commentary about her body, I had been minding my own business just a few feet away.

Dr. Krauss pulled me from my memories. “No more, ‘I think,’ Young. A big part of working through grief is going to be acceptance. We can start by dispelling some of that doubt that’s burdening you, okay? Work on that this week—shoring up your confidence in your thoughts and actions. Think of it as homework.”

Fucking homework. It's always homework. He never says directly that I’m failing at this or not progressing toward improving my situation. All I could hear was Ramona’s voice.

“Oh—hey! Young!” she called to me, pulling herself from the growing crowd and wrapping herself tightly to my arm, her breasts pressing against the chilled exterior of my near-second-generation jacket.

“How do you know my—” I tried to get out before her lips pushed to silence mine. A whisper followed the kiss: “Please, play along?” Her voice was breathless and airy, yet demanding. And from that moment, her wish was my command, as horrible as that is to admit now. How weak I must have been to have my will drawn and quartered from something so simple as a kiss from a stranger.

We wandered along one of the many overgrown trails that once connected the campsites and the main administrative building. When I questioned the origins of her knowledge, she smiled simply, touched my cheek with the back of her cool hand, and nodded toward the work shirt hanging from an unzipped corner of my bag; the name tag was on prominent display. She told me her name and thanked me for helping her flee the mob.

“Can I… this is so strange. But can I confide something in you, Young?”

“Uh—sure,” I muttered before responding more affirmatively. “Yes. You absolutely can.”

“I only came out this way tonight ‘cus I figured this wouldn’t happen. It always does, anywhere I go. Abraham, Tronts, any of the other sad little villages. Maybe Yickwick would be better—but it turns out it was worse.”

“I’m sorry.” I said simply, “I don’t understand it at all. But I sort of understand the opposite. I’m more someone who’s been passed over.”

“But I didn’t pass you over,” she responded gently as we rounded the path's last corner to the abandoned admin building. She grabbed both my hands and walked backward, pulling me in closer. Before Ramona, I had never been so close to someone. My palms were sweaty, and my breathing was shallow in anticipation.

“You didn’t,” I confirmed. “You didn’t.” Her lips met mine again, and she pushed my hands against her tummy as her arms wrapped up through my jacket. In the sudden moment of intimacy, I lost my focus, and seemingly within seconds, I was pushed against a cinder wall inside, shielding us from the cool autumn wind. Our clothes fell, and she took what she wanted.

Afterward, we exchanged phone numbers, and she left. In the following months, she made no appearance in Yickwick or at any of the youthful ragers, and I figured I would never see her again. Until one day, out of the blue, I received a phone call.

I refocused on Dr. Krauss. “I can manage that.”

Understanding his desired responses and the best tone to use for them hasn't taken me long. We wrapped up the session, and he hurried me through my out-of-pocket payment with his assistant. I climbed down the four-story staircase and back into the parking lot.

My car was the only one ever here. Another car's appearance surprised me. Maryland license plates weren’t unheard of here, but exceedingly rare. Abraham, West Virginia, wasn’t exactly along any significant route north, south, east, or west.

It made me nervous, but I didn’t see anyone inside. The only other businesses in the building were an office supplier, a leatherworker, and a nonprofit related to women’s shelters in the region.

I was slowly approaching, checking over my shoulders toward the alley and the building. When I peered in, the eyes of a fetus stared back at me, and I fell back onto my hands. I winced as I felt a small nail in the gravel lot pierce my palm, and when I reopened my eyes, the car was gone—another delusion gone as quickly as it came.

I gripped the head of the nail in my teeth, dragged the rough inch and a half of shorn, rusted metal from the meat below my thumb, and tried not to cry from the discomfort. After fumbling with the keys, I popped the trunk and dug through the small first aid kit under the spare wheel for a bandage. I must have drunk the rubbing alcohol at some point, so the best I can do now is remember to clean it later.

I sat in the driver's seat and listened to the old hinges struggle to lock the door back in place. Fucking junker. The screen of my phone felt cold against my thumb.

No messages, no notifications.

Just a thumb, stroking across the face of a girl I barely knew who carried a baby I would never know. I knew nothing would be there, that no one would give a shit enough to call or text, but the sense of absence was overwhelming. I’m just raw from the session, like always.

I turned the key and listened to the engine turn over, and suddenly I woke up. Sitting in the parking lot of McGilligan’s Bar. I wiped the drool from my chin and slowly blinked the crust away from my eyes. Luckily, the car was on, and so was the heat. When I looked down, I saw a pistol sitting in my lap, and I tossed it onto the passenger seat in fear.

Something slammed into my driver's side window, and when I looked, I saw a hooded figure pressed against the door. The hood's fabric connected seamlessly with the glass, and I could see endless black staring back at me.

It screamed at me in some language I had never heard, “Csy evi rsx jvii, Csyrk.”

I grabbed the gun, and when I looked back, the figure was gone, his words echoing in the breeze of his disappearance. My nerves got the better of me, and when I tapped the gun against my head nervously trying to decipher what had happened, I felt the heat blast from the barrel.

My eyes opened, and Dr. Krauss was looking at me expectantly.

“Wha—what?” I asked, “Can you repeat that?”

“I asked if you had a shift at the factory tonight. Shouldn’t you be there?” He replied.

“It’s the middle of the day,” I said. He pointed toward the window. I could see the streetlights shining through the glass. I realized the room was dark, save for that little light.

“Might want to get there,” he suggested.

“Sure,” I said skeptically, backing away. When I opened the door, the fluorescent lights of the industrial bathroom blinded me. A heavy steel door replaced the light wooden one, slamming shut behind me.

The lights flickered, but the air was still. The world was silent—finally, some peace. I rubbed my hand down my face and leaned over the sink, letting the hot water steam my skin. In the mirror, I saw burned, frayed hairs on my left side. I wiped away the black powder smudge, but it had stained and burned my skin.

I must be dreaming. But the burn felt real. Irritated. Infected. The more I looked at it, the worse it became. The more horrid its stench grew. The more my skin peeled away. But the red and white of human meat wasn’t underneath. It was too dark in the chasm crawling out from under me to see the building blocks of humanity. And my nerves and bones had no response to this vacuum.

I ran for the bathroom door and found myself standing in the forest. An old, abandoned public park bathroom was now behind me. There was no sign of the machines of human innovation. There were only ancient, untouched virgin trees and the undergrowth of the Lake Longhorn campground.

I hadn’t been back since Ramona and I met, not even in the interim between our meeting and her sudden phone call.

It didn’t look the way it should. I don’t mean it didn’t look the way I remembered. Even I could rationalize that forests grow and change—slowly, sure, but faster than I did. This was some version of the forest that never existed—or existed so long ago it may as well have never been. The bathroom’s structure was the only thing inherently human about this place, and it did not belong. Even the concrete knew it, slowly crumbling into dust as it lingered in this realm too long.

I walked toward the lake, but the forest stretched endlessly for folding, repeating miles in front of me, and no matter how quickly I ran, it never grew closer. But the hooded figure behind me did, even though his feet never moved.

Unlike before, it whispered, instead of screamed: “Csy evi rsx jvii, Csyrk.”

“But I want to be,” I responded. I never translated the words, but somehow, I felt them. “I want to be free. Please. I don’t want this anymore.”

Water splashed at my ankles, and smooth rocks and thin sand shifted beneath my feet. The forest was gone now, a memory I could see from the center of Lake Longhorn. When I looked down, all I saw were dark, still waters.

The figure stood across from me, the water pouring from the empty, open socket where a face should have been. The hood was like a pipe, drawing the lake up through this creature’s hollow body and spraying it back. Only the water that came from it never replenished the dying waters.

My feet grew more unstable as the rocks beneath me collapsed and vanished into the creature’s siphon.

“Csy evi rsx jvii, Csyrk.”

It was right. I wasn’t. This whole time, since I lost Ramona, I’ve never fought for myself. I looked down at the water vanishing into darkness from the shaky tower I now stood on and leapt. I wouldn’t stay, not on its terms.

When I woke up, I could hear the humming and beeping of some device, but fluorescent lights blinded me. A masked man gripped the tube coming from my arm and filled it with a liquid that burned through my veins. I tried to scream, only for the apparatus filling my throat to stop me. I tried to run, only to realize my legs were bound in menacing steel contraptions.

I tried to look around, but only saw a white, sterile bassinet. I tried to cry, but Ramona wouldn’t let me. And when she and the baby vanished, the masked man returned with a masked woman.

They filled my veins again, and I felt myself drift back to sleep, but this time, no dreams came.