Journal Entry
From the journal of Minnow Gray
The dreams started the night my father died. Always underwater, always black-and-white. Not all of the dreams were bad. In
fact, some were quite peaceful. But some made me wake up screaming in terror. Even caused me to run through the house and
claw at the door, trying to break free. They haunted me. I remember the doc on the island saying they were just night terrors—lots
of kids had them. My mom called bullshit on that as she took my hand and pulled me out the door. Her words stuck with me.
“How many of those kids have witnessed their father bleed to death in the ocean from a shark attack?” she’d said.
After that, we took the ferry to Newport once a week to see Dr. Ralston, a kind old man who let me play with a sandbox and
shelves and shelves full of figurines. He never said much, just turned me loose and observed from behind his oval glasses
and narrow, finlike nose. On the first day I avoided the plastic sharks, but after that I couldn’t stay away. They became
the main players in my time there.
Dr. Ralston took copious notes and got very excited whenever I placed a man among the sharks, but over the next year the dreams
continued full force. Even intensifying.
I heard my mom telling him, “I can’t take the screaming at night.”
“These kinds of things take time,” he said, pleading with her to stick with the therapy.
We never went back. Mom couldn’t afford it. Her income from the gallery was sporadic at best, and she’d had to get another
job at the front desk of the Inn on the Cove. I liked that better than therapy because I had the run of the place, including
the ocean out front. Though now Mom would go into a tirade if she caught me going in the water below my neck, which happened
regularly. All the while, I had this feeling that my life would never be normal. I would never be normal.