Dream A Little Dream of Me

Liar. Thief. Crazy. Reckless. Calamity Jane. Throughout my life I’ve been called many things. Most were labels, pressed into me like bruises out of judgment, fear or envy. And the harshest label I carried around was the one that I unknowingly gave myself: the Bad One.

But the one word that had never been spoken—the one buried within me like a dormant seed- was magic. Not the kind you read about in fairy tales. The kind that lives in intuition, in dreams that warn and guide, in the subtle moments of synchronicity that I’d felt pulsing beneath the turbulent mosaic of my life.

But when my daughter died—just as I had dreamed she would—the layers of debris disintegrated. Her death cracked me open, and through that rupture came the Truth.  

Guided by higher souls and the strange grace of my own visions, I began to understand that love is the only thing that matters, that pain doesn’t punish—it awakens, and true freedom is born from surrender to mystery and trust in the sanctity of our Selves.

She tossed her hair and gave him a daring look. “Wanna go get our fortunes told?”

“Sure, why not?” he smiled back. They  went through the street-level door that was propped open and up a flight of mint green steps tiled in an ancient, art deco pattern. At the top of the stairs another door was also propped open.

 They stepped through and found themselves standing not in a foyer or a corridor, but a private living room. There was a couch and an easy chair, family pictures on the wall and knickknacks on the coffee table. The curtains were closed, keeping the bright spring sunlight at bay and making the dimly- lit room even darker. She glanced at him with raised eyebrows. Were they in the right place? He appeared to be as confused as she was. This wasn’t some studio or office; this was someone’s home. It smelled personal: there were lingering odors of cooking, of pipe smoke, of human bodies.

 She was nonplussed. How could someone just leave their private door open for any old stranger to walk in? In fact, how could someone deliberately invite a stranger into what was clearly a private residence? The neighborhood and its culture may have been open and accepting, but this was still Chicago after all-one just didn’t leave one’s doors open to random people from outside. They whispered their confusion to each other, their voices instinctively lowered.

Eventually she called out. “Hello? Anyone there?”  

A female voice immediately responded from the other room telling them to wait one moment, and they both jumped in fright, giggling nervously.

It was then that she spotted the child. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it looked to be about five or six years old. It was sitting quietly in a corner of the sofa with its hands folded in its lap, longish dark hair neatly combed, wearing a plain sweater and pants, looking back at them silently.

A wave of outrage swept over her, quickly replacing her shock.  

“Who the hell not only leaves their door open to the weirdos of the world, but also leaves a little kid unattended at the same time?” she whispered. Her tone was furious.

But the righteous anger didn’t last long.  It was quickly replaced by confusion, and maybe a little fear, as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. She peered through the dimness while trying not to stare at the same time.

 There was …. something…. covering the child’s face. She could make out features-eyes, nose, a mouth, but there was a sheer layer of something obscuring the child’s face. Was it pantyhose? A scarf ? Whatever it was, it was creepy as hell.

She forced a polite smile, but her skin was crawling in horror. She averted her eyes out of reflex, but they kept returning to the child’s face as she tried to process what she was seeing.  

After a moment, she knew what she was looking at. The child had a caul on its face. A freaking caul.

Her only knowledge of cauls came from horror novels, where a membrane of skin covering the face of a person at birth meant something like having a sixth sense or some kind of superpower, but never in her life had she expected to see one on an actual living person.

Before she could process it any further, a dark-haired woman entered the room and said something to the child in another language. The child obediently rose and went into the other room. The woman invited them to sit on the couch and took their money for the reading. She was olive-skinned and spoke with a light accent of some sort.

The woman started with him. She took his hand in hers and looked at his palm  and read his fortune: the usual stuff about health and happiness. By the time she was finished, they’d both relaxed. The kid thing had been bizarre, but the rest of it was just like they’d seen on television and cheesy movies- ambiguous, vague, and relatively benign. When it was her turn, the woman took her hand and repeated most of the same stuff, then added something more cryptic at the end.

“You are going to have to make a choice soon,” she said.

 “A choice?”

The woman nodded. “You’re standing on a dock. There is a ship. You can either board the ship and go where it takes you, or you can stay on the shore. But once you make the decision you won’t be able to undo it. You can’t go back.”

She said it again, as if to make sure she was understood.

 “You can’t go back.”

In the months and years to come, she would remember not feeling anything particularly visceral upon hearing the prediction. There’d been no ominous wrenching in her gut, no impending sense of destiny, no sense of any kind that this was anything other than a standard phrase that a storefront psychic was in the habit of repeating. She did remember a brief, if cynical, sense of appreciation that the woman had tried to make their readings different enough to seem unique, but there had been nothing to let her know just how accurate the prediction would turn out to be.

Years later, as a middle-aged woman, when she would sit for hours on her back porch, frozen in grief and struck dumb with pain, staring at the sky, the trees, the birds, trying to make sense of her life and her choices, trying to wrestle her mind around the Dreams and the warnings of impending horror and loss, that would be the main thing she couldn’t reconcile: the absolute banality of how it all happened. The mystical, magical, otherworldly events that would irrevocably change the course of her life had seemed no different than any other of the million mundane moments of daily existence.

Occasionally, she’d ask him about the fortune teller they’d visited so long ago when they were young and falling in love, wanting to get a sense of his thoughts about it, but he would admit that he didn’t even remember the child with the caul on its face or the psychic’s predictions that day. He also didn’t remember when she’d had some of her more terrifying or emotional dreams, even though at the time he’d wake up and try to comfort her. Even though his mind was usually sharp and he had a great memory. Still, by the morning, he just wouldn’t remember.

And on the day when karma, destiny, fate, call it whatever-was actually happening, there were no special signs. No ravens cawing at the window or tingling at the back of her neck or voices in her head warning her or any other sign- any other goddam kind of clue- at all. It was as if someone or something had deliberately closed her senses down so that she wouldn’t be warned. Like something had been purposely placed over her mind and her heart to prevent her from knowing what was coming.

A caul of sorts, if you will.

Excerpt