Chapter 6
I dream of the couple—if that’s what they were. The woman and the man.
In the dream the man has hot irons for hands.
He’s bringing them toward her face, which is turned to me, frozen not in terror but annoyed surprise.
I tell her to move, to get up and run, but she just lies there, looking.
He brings his iron hands up and scalds her, causing her mouth to form that same O, but without sound.
The smell of burning flesh fills the room and when I scream, I’m muted, too.
I turn away from her smoldering cheeks and wake in the dark next to Tom, tears streaming down my face and onto the pillow.
Save your tears for your pillow, Grandmother told me when I was a child. And I did. I saved them all for my pillow, and here I am, soaking it some forty years later.
Leave the past in the past, she also told me, with something like disgust. I’ve struggled my whole life to obey.