Episode 3: Anger

She tore apart the bedroom looking for the shotgun. Then she tore apart the house. Mattresses turned upside down. She checked the fridge. It could be anywhere in dreams. She never wandered all that far from the house. She never really saw a reason why she should. She could typically manifest almost anything into her dreams wherever she was. A volcano. Two Jakes. A beach. Anything could happen if she let it. If she had the control. But when she thought too hard about it, or seemed too helpless, she tended to have a harder time making the things she needed to happen actually happen. It was a wicked trick of the brain. Dreams will do anything you want until they do anything they want. Sometimes, though, she’d try to make something appear out of thin air in the real world only to forget it wasn’t a dream. But she knew she was trapped in another dream. This kind of fear, Jake’s corpse, the absolute horror––it was like a re-run. She’d seen it so many times before that she’d almost become callous to the images. She even feared that her dreams were going to start ramping it up and get more terrifying––to counteract her growing immunity to horror.
Her dreams would also move things around, just slightly, to fuck with her. To see her anxiety grow and grow––bouncing around the house looking for something that should, in fact, be there. The organism was a voyeur.
When she couldn’t find the gun, and it finally seemed pointless, she rummaged through the medicine cabinet. She wasn’t going to run to the nearest bridge. Her roof wasn’t high enough. There were knives, but… she couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. There was an orange extension cord coiled up in the kitchen closet. She’d thought about it before––but… the sound of the snap of the neck. She couldn’t. In her mind, hanging was something reserved for hopeless romantics. A symbol of extreme love lost. She couldn’t bring herself to do that. So… pills. The pills would allow her to slip away out of the dream. A quiet, painless death. Just because it was a dream-body didn’t mean all the sensations weren’t still very much alive. If something was hot, she would still recoil from it. If something was sharp, she would still bleed from it. The pills would make for a gentle return.
There was one prescription in the vanity. Of course, she thought. Nearly a full bottle though. Leftover from Jake’s knee surgery. She threw back all the pills and washed them down with some sink water cupped in her hand. She lay down on the carpet and watched the ceiling fan turn. She did not move… as if she kept perfectly still the drugs would work faster. She felt confident. Unafraid. She squeezed her eyes shut, and saw Jake’s face in the ground outside. The darkness of her eyes, the soil, the exposed roots of the sugar gum tree.
It reminded her of the first night she ever spent with her Jake, when they were still just dating. How afraid she was to tell him that if she might very well wake up screaming in a few hours. That, no matter what he said, she might not even recognize him. It didn’t bother him. He didn’t even flinch.
When she was thirteen, only a year after the trauma, she put her head through her bedroom window one night. Her parents thought she was trying to escape, trying to run away from whatever fear was chasing her in the nightmare.
The best any doctors could tell her was something she already knew: that the incident was the foundation of her trauma––and the trauma manifested itself in the form of these fucked up night terrors.
The color began to leave her vision. The numb-tingle crept down from her scalp and into her tongue. Her teeth felt numb. She was fading and it felt good. Ruby fucking red slippers, she thought. Finally, a heavy darkness fell through her like an anvil.

*

She woke up on the bedroom floor to a buzzing. The doorbell. A wave of joy washed through her. Her bones ached. Her throat hurt—like it typically did after a night of screaming. The doorbell kept buzzing and she figured she better go answer it. The immediacy of the nightmare wears off in time. The images linger, always, sure, but their grip on her would fade by the time her and Jake would sit down for dinner. She popped up off the floor without even thinking, got her balance, and took the stairs down toward the entrance.
It was their neighbor, Sally. She was nice enough––but tried a little too hard to be girlfriends. Ash had a hard time making friends. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to––she just didn’t put in the effort. She knew she should––she wanted to be neighborly––for whatever reason she just never went out of her way to make plans. The chalked it up to the apathy.
“Are you OK in there?” Sally called through the door. She did, however, tell Sally about the terrors faster than it took her to tell Jake about the terrors. Her and Jake made sure to warn the neighbors fairly soon after introducing themselves. (In her first apartment, right out of college, she once had a neighbor call the cops because the screaming was so bad. There was that other time, too, when she woke up in the back of a cop car, barefoot––wrapped in a blanket. The cops said she was trying to climb a streetlight. Something about trying to “fuck up the moon…”)
Just as Ash went to open the front door, she noticed the faint stains of blood and dirt on her hands. It was still there. This evidence of a reality. The sight of her hands made her dizzy. Her feet stopped working––heavy, unsettled. Her heart began to throb in her temples. She nearly collapsed, but caught her balance on the banister. She was heaving.
“I… I can’t come to the door, Sally,” Ashley called out.
“Paul heard you screaming earlier. We were concerned—just wanted to stop by and see if I could...”
“I’m fine, Sally. Thanks. Just a rough night.”
“I thought I’d offer to cook dinner for you and Jake… let you guys take a load off for the night…”
“Jake’s not…” She stopped herself. She could see Jake’s car parked right where it was in her dream… Like it never moved.
“I don’t feel up for it. Really appreciate it though,” Ashley said.
“Alright, I totally get it” Sally said. “Call if you need anything. We’re right here. The baby’s keeping me awake all night––so don’t hesitate to tell me you changed your mind.”
“Really, thank you. I’ll… call tomorrow.” She could hardly form words. It was if she could feel her intestine twisting inside her from the nerves.
She sat on the steps, listening to Sally’s footsteps recede from the house and into her own. She could hear Sally’s door shut. Sounds that sounded real––but they always sounded real. Fuck, she thought. Fuck this. She lay her head in her hands and doubled-over. Crying. She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t support her own weight. She crawled to the bedroom. Her vision began to tunnel.
There was vomit on the carpet. The undigested pills. The room spun. She hoisted herself up by the bedframe and limped to the bathroom. Splashed some water on her face. Dried blood all around the porcelain sink.
There was no difference between the real and the dream. She needed to find something, anything, to help her brain focus, adjust, anchor itself to reality. Her reflection looked hideous to her. It is possible to wake up into dreams,” she said to the mirror. You can wake up into a dream.
“These images are only assembled to scare me,” she said.”
She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to summon Jake’s voice in her heart. All she could feel was the dread moving worm-like up through her core.
It was dark again, and the tarp glowed in the moonlight.
“I never asked for any of this,” she said.