SHORT STORY

Death and Life (excerpt)

The same night Death falls off the wall and sprays slit-throat confetti over the carpet around our bed, I have a dream I am drowning. When I tell Nadia about it the next morning, I feel the wet and the cold all over again. I can even smell my dried-up fear sweat. I don’t dream like that normally, dreams so real you can smell them — but I can tell by Nadia’s face that sometimes she does. In the dream my feet are stuck in the bottom of a concrete water tank and the water is coming in slowly, interminably, from a hose draped over its side, rising, until it slops over my chin, reaches for my mouth. When I can no longer yell, only shutter my lips, it takes my nose, my hands twitching like crushed moths at the glowing rim, and this is the moment — swear to god — that outside the dream, inside the room, we’re ripped awake by smashing glass.

I panic, sleep-dumb. Knees, ankles, twisted sheets. Lizard-brain screams Someone’s breaking in! and then I’m standing on the bed, fists balled, ready. But there is no one.