Dream Big

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting the first parts of several of the short stories I've been working on, between other actual blog entries. Any feedback is welcome.

Here is the first part of a longer story, really a series of interlocking vignettes that connect in the final segments.
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The night was dark, and the bedroom lights had been off for a half an hour when Jay spoke. Like always, the streetlights outside the window cast just enough light through the gauze of the threadbare curtains to half-illuminate their back bedroom. So it was never pitch black, just shadowy. It was sort of like a nightlight, though at ten-years-old, he was, of course, way beyond the need for such things. Really. He kind of enjoyed the suburban half-light all night for sleeping, but he did like it quiet. But slightly more than silence, he liked getting the last word in.

“Anyway, dreaming of elephants is silly,” he said.

“Why? Why is it silly?” his little sister said, from the other side of the room. Jay heard, more than saw, Cally sit bolt upright in the pitch black as she spoke. It was for dramatic effect, he was sure. But her preschool mentality didn’t appreciate that performing in the dark cut the drama. They’d shared this room from her infancy, within the confines of their small house on the outskirts of their small town. Her bed diagonally across from his since it was a crib, Jay had put up with her crying, her nightmares, her bed-wetting, and in recent months her late night philosophical conversations on the nature of moon and why cheese was stinky, but whipped cream smelled good. He even put up with her middle of the night screams when her bed nudged out from the wall, and shed fallen into the small space between the bed and the wall, rudely awakened and terrified. Jay had been the one to make a game of it, calling that space her “hidey-hole” and making it fun to the point that Mom had to stop her from ducking into it every morning when she was supposed to be getting up. Jay had gotten in trouble for that one, too. But older brothers can only be asked so much, and it was getting to be a bit much. Still, he loved her, and acknowledged his responsibility as the oldest to educate the poor thing. Without opening his eyes, he indulged her.

“Well, you need to be careful what you fit into your dreams, for one thing,” he said. “Elephants are way, way big. You shouldn’t dream things too big to fit.”

“Elephants can fit in my dreams,” Cally said. “I can fit very big things in my dreams. I like to dream big things. Once I dreamed a whole entire house in my dreams, a big mansion!”

“Yeah, but you dream a room at a time, and really, then, only a part of a room at a time, like a dresser, or a table, or a closet. It just feels like a whole house. But you never see the whole house at the same time. So, really it’s not that big.”

Jay heard the wet smack of Cally’s lower lip popping out in an angry pout. Or maybe he imagined he heard it. Either way, he was sure the pout was there. And he heard a rustle he assumed would be her folding her arms. Through it all, he kept his eyes closed, determined that he would go to sleep before he got sucked into another late-night debate with a five-year-old.

It had begun simply enough. Tomorrow they were going to the circus, and they hadn’t been to a circus in years, not since Cally was an infant in a carrier. By Jay’s limited recollection, she’d slept through it. So when she said she was excited to see the elephants again, Jay had challenged her, saying she’d never even seen an elephant, outside of television. She argued that she had, that she’d dreamed of elephants. Jay has said no she hadn’t and she said yes she had, and Jay said she always made up stuff that she dreamed about, rather than really remembering, and she had said that she was the boss of her brain and not Jay, and anyway Jay was a stupid head, and Mom had shut down the conversation.

“You just ought to be careful, is all I’m saying.” Jay said, a bit petulantly. “Dream too big, and something might get stuck there, and you might not be able to get it out again. Remember the cowbell?”

Cally remembered the little brass bell; something her parents had said was a favor from their wedding. It had a large ring at the top of it, meant to be a handle by which you could manipulate the leaden weight inside to produce the soft tinkle, which the kids called the cowbell. The ring was much too small for an adult finger, but to a three-year-old, the cowbell ring seemed ready-made for wear. Cally had slipped it over her middle finger, and run away from Jay, to a soundtrack of metal tinkling and giggles, calling that she wouldn’t be milked, not today, not today! When it had come time for them to go to school, Cally had been terrified to see that she couldn’t get the cowbell off. She’d hid it behind her back all that morning, and on the bus ride in, so it had been her teacher who first noticed his additional appendage. The school nurse had been unable to remove it, and parents had been called. A quick trip to the emergency room, a few swipes of a metal cutting tool, and the ring atop the cowbell was no more. Now it was a crescent shape atop the thick brass bell. Cally looked at it with a hint of sorrowful remembrance nearly every day. Yes, Cally remembered the cowbell, and how her finger seemed to go in so easily, but then was impossible to get out again. She let out a heavy sigh.

“Do you really think an elephant could get stuck in my dream?” She said, looking at the dark outline of her hand before her face.

Jay finally rolled over and, finally, looked at his little sister, or rather her partial, darkened outline, with exasperation. He always had to explain the simplest concepts to her. Being in second grade was already such a burden; Cally’s late night sessions didn’t make his life any easier. Mom never had to listen to Cally, safely tucked in her own room upstairs, and never believed Jay’s stories about how chatty Cally got at night. He looked forward to next summer, when Mom had promised he’d get his own room in the basement, and be able to sleep the night through without the late night Q&A.

“Why do you think they have a thing called brain surgeons, silly?” he said, “It’s a doctor that has to operate on your brains, and try to get out stuff that sticks there. They have to saw open your skull, and sort of reach into your brains, and look for a hard spot or something moving, like a stuck elephant.

“What happens to the elephant when they get it out?”

Jay paused for a minute, eyes shooting up to the ceiling as he thought. “Oh, once it’s out of your brain, it just vanishes, like all your dreams do when you wake up. It’s only getting in there and getting too big, that sticks it. But it costs a lot of money to get it out. You remember how mad Mom got when they got the bill for getting the bell off? Well, it’s a lot more money to hire a brain surgeon. You don’t want to go there.”

With that statement putting a final period on the conversation, Jay slumped back onto his pillow. Conversation over. And the room was silent for a good minute.

“Does it hurt?” Cally asked, timidly. Jay let out another deep sigh, puffing both cheeks out. Tomorrow would never come, he was sure. He would sit up here and talk to Cally all night, and the sun would come up, and it would be the next day but without any sleep Jay would feel like it was the same day, and tomorrow would never, ever get here. And then he would fall asleep in Ms. Leary’s class, and get sent to the principles office, and have to bring a note home, and probably get in trouble, when it’s fault in the first place for putting me in the same room with Cally anyway, and it just wasn’t fair.

That’s when he heard the glass breaking.

The room was dark, and the night without even darker with the new moon and slightly overcast sky, so it was only another silhouette that Jay saw. At their window. Breaking their window. Jay saw a large gloved hand reach through bottom pane and grope for the knob that would unlock the window.

Jay rolled out of his bed and onto Cally’s, whispering a quick, quiet shsssh into her ear as she sat, transfixed. The hand found its goal, and twisted the lock open. The lower pane began to rise, slowly at first, and then once the hand found purchase underneath, quickly up. Jay wrapped his arms around Cally, and pushed her back into the corner.

“Hidey hole,” he whispered, as he pushed the bed frame away from the wall with one foot, and she slid noiselessly down to the floor. Jay slid over, nearly on top of her. But there wasn’t enough room to conceal them both. From his position, face down on the edge of her bed, looking down into the space where he imagined Cally must be quivering, Jay reached a hand down and found her face, and placed a finger gingerly on Cally’s lips. Shhhh, he said with his hand, and his mind there in the darkness, and would have said with his eyes, if she could have but seen them, if you’ve never been able to be quiet before in your life, please be quiet now.

The shape was in the room now, and moving toward Jay’s bed. Darkened hands patted at the pillow and still-warm sheets, tossing them to the side in frustration at finding the empty bed. Then it turned toward Cally’s bed. It grabbed at the sheets again, stopping when he felt Jays foot at the head of the bed, at the corner from which it protruded. An instant later Jay felt two strong hands at his shoulders lift him from the bed.

Cally, looking up from her hidey-hole saw the change of light as her brother left the opening above her. But she stayed still, moving her own hand to replace Jays, placing her own finger to her lips as Jays had been. Shhhh, she thought. Shhhhhhhhh.