Restive Sleep

Rhun didn’t realize that she really was invading his dreams until he fell asleep that nights. His mind was full of her as he lied in bed waiting for sleep. The day played back in his mind like an old news reel without sound. He couldn’t get the image of her lying there, looking thin and frail, out of his mind. The image of her brother looking down at her, his face twisted in pain an guilt because he blamed himself for everything. Rhun couldn’t just leave her be and let her wake up on her own when she was trapped in her own mind.

His objective was to find her, and that’s what he fell asleep thinking.

He didn’t understand the threat of the shadows until he began dreaming. It wasn’t his dream anymore. Everything was darker and lacked the bright colors his dreams held. In fact, there was no color to speak of. Everything was black, white, and grey. He felt like he walked into an abstract painting that was hung on the set of a noir film. The shadows cast off the corners in dark geometric shapes. Nothing in the room looked as it should. In his dreams, a coffee table looked like a coffee table, and a bookshelf looked like a bookshelf. Here, everything looked like it have been drawn with a compass and a ruler, angular and geometric. This was the world she lived in, the world she had been living in for the past three months. No wonder she always was eager to enter his dreams.

Rhun walked through the house, wondering if she was already there waiting for him, but there was no sign of her anywhere. Or at least there wasn’t in any of the places they normally were. Not that he could tell the difference between one room to another. Everything looked the same.

Then he heard her screaming. The sound came from behind a door that was decorated with several different types of padlocks and deadlocks. It was the front door that she always came rushing through every night in his dreams. She banged on the door and jiggled the door knob with a frenzied panic. “Rhunws!”

He ran to the door. “Delilah!” he shouted. Her screaming and clawing didn’t cease. She was lost in her own fear. He yanked at the locks on his side of the door without success; none of them would budge. She had to unlock them for him. He needed to calm her down, or else he was never going to get past this door. “Delilah, calm down.” There was no response from her side that hinted that she even heard him. He hit the door with the palm of his hand, making a loud thump sound. “Delilah, calm down, damnit.”

The pounding and screaming died down on her side of the door, and there was a moment of silence before she responded. “Rhunws?”

Rhunws? What was with the extra syllable she added to the end of his name? He wanted to correct her, and point out that his name was actually Rhun, but decided that was the least of their problems. “Delilah, I need you to open this door.”

“What? Why… But this is your house.”

“This is your dream. You have to open the door.”

“My dream? Rhunws, what are you talking about?”

“This isn’t real. All of this, everything you see around you isn’t real,” he explained through the door.

“You’ve been asleep for three months.”

“What?” Her voice was more confused than shocked. She couldn’t quite connect all of the pieces of the puzzle, and the picture didn’t make sense without them. “You can’t just go to sleep for three months.”

“You can if you suffer from head trauma in an accident.”

“What are you saying?”

“You were in a car accident with your brother three months ago. You and your brother went to an away football game so that you could take pictures for the school paper. On the way home, you were hit by a drunk driver. You hit your—“ Rhun was interrupted by the sound of locks clicking. He stepped away from the door and watched as the door unlocked itself. It swung open when the last lock was open, and met her gaze.

Her eyes were wide open, her jaw was ajar. “I remember.”

The world around them stretched and twisted, creating a greyscale swirl, before becoming a memory. Rhun found himself sitting the back of a car. Delilah was sitting in the front passenger seat, reenacting the night of the crash. Her brother was driving, and they were laughing about something. Delilah had her camera in her lap and was going through her pictures from the game.

“Did you get any good shots?” her brother asked, glancing over at her.

She shrugged, “More or less.”

He took a quick look at the picture that was displayed on the camera’s screen. “Who’s that?”

“The guy in the picture? I donno, but I think he goes to my school though. He just seemed so out of place at that moment, I just had to take his picture.”

Rhun leaned forward to see the photo. On the screen was a photo of him. He was confused at first, wondering why he would be in the picture and trying to figure out why he would have been at that American football game, then he remembered. Dan had dragged him to that game because neither of their mothers could attend it. Dan’s mum had to have photos from every sporting event her son participated in, and if she couldn’t be there, she assigned photo duty to the next available relative.

Rhun was lucky enough to be given that job. He’d spent most of the game confused, since he never really learned how American football worked. He remembered seeing a girl take a picture in his general direction, but didn’t realize that she was taking a picture of him.

“He did look pretty lost.” Her brother commented, turning his eyes back to the road.

Delilah turned off her camera and put it back into its case. “Now that I think about it, I think he’s that new student from the UK.” She laughed, “No wonder he looked lost. American football must be a pretty foreign thing to him.”

The car stopped at stoplight, and they waited for the light to turn green. Delilah’s brother didn’t wait the two seconds that’s advised before going after the light switches. He didn’t see the car that was running the red light either. “Wyatt!” Delilah screamed right before the other car hit them.

Rhun’s eyes shot open, and he found himself looking up into the darkness of his room. “Damn,” he muttered.