Short fiction nine

The dog was the problem between us. That's what I thought then at least. Now I can see that any first year psych student would have been able to see that the dog just bore the brunt of the problem. It had taken root in each of our minds separately then finally  merged into a single great growth between us, pushing us apart, our timber creaking, to make room for the giant it planned to become. My need to comfort the dog during storms, to make him feel safe and protected, to find the perfect place for his bed that would guarantee he'd be able to hide from his myriad spooks but also would never feel alone or isolated - how could I not see that all of this was my own fear and anxiety sprung  wholly from my head like (Zeus' child), my internal horror at my own manners, my nagging shame of being Less Than assuming the form of that greatest of Danes, my dog. 

No, the personification of my darkest anxieties and fears was not godlike at all. Zeus would never have personified the part of himself he both loathed and couldn't understand. A closer analogy for the projection of my anxiety onto the dog would be some kind of south American parasite  - it was an anxiety capable of consuming my entire identity and, unfinished, fabricating a loose system of hollow reactions and downcast eyes to pass as humanity to the few peers not immune enough to it be repelled by it automatically. 

So the dog got lazier. It turned out of course he wasn't just lazier; I'd infected him with my depressive-anxiety. The dog and I manifested our symptoms the same way. We stayed in our beds. We were silent; I dont know whether he would have spoken to anyone if he could have.  I recognized the vacancy behind his eyes from the mirror I looked into every morning while brushing my teeth. I recognized it before I even saw it, I suppose, in his eyes or in mine. In that place the mind is emptier than a vacuum. It doesn't even have the force to suck thoughts in in order to crush them infinitesimally. It had neither content nor force. I barely remember living there, because memories need to be tied to words like balloons to those little sandbags to be retained, to be kept, but in that place there were no words in my head  so any memory that may've found something with which to fill itself must just have drifted off. 

I've always had nightmares. I'm afraid of a lot of unreasonable things that I don't tell people about. As the summer melted into a sunny fall the nightmaresstarted coming for me during the day. I fell asleep midday, unwillingly, pulled by dreams i didn't want. 

Nightmares slid long fingers into my conscious mind and pulled me down into their myriad darkness, like long seaweed catches an anchor, until i was moored in their phantasmic depths, crying out loud from the watery deep of my screaming dreams: I woke, angry: angry like the man shaking me. 

"Don't fucking interrupt me. Im working, asshole."

I nodded, how many times?.

I said "yes." 

I said "I'm sorry."'  

I said "I didn't mean to." 

I tried to sit upright. I held a novel open on my thighs. So many novels, those long afternoons. But the long pale slimy fingers reached around my mind, dug their nails into the gray matter between my ears, worked my brain like dough, and took me again. I was so quickly lost to the primal fear of nightmare. 

It was a cycle of fear that led to more anxiety. I got quieter, he got angrier. In the mornings I woke up slowly. I made weak tea and returned to bed to read, but my eyelids were heavier than steel weights, they pulled down. I rolled my eyes up to fight them, and he found me passed out with my eyes rolled up into my head.

I tried to tell him how hard I tried to stay awake. I described staring at my hand, mentally demanding it to lift, to push me up, but he didn't want to hear. I told him how many times I felt myself standing and walking across the room, only to stand at the sink and look at the bed, seeing myself still flat across it. They call it sleep paralysis. He didn't like to hear me talk about these things,  he thought I was asking him to solve a problem and proving his impotence by making him admit to not knowing how. I just needed to talk, to know another person knew what I was fighting. 

I slipped into nightmares before I was even asleep. I laid in bed staring at the hand I couldn't move and yelled his name, I screamed for help but heard no voice come out. Nightmares. He couldn't hear me. A sleeping girl cannot cry for help any more than she can raise her hand. He saw those moments as symptomatic of an illness he didn't want in his lover. He didn't like me to talk about them, he thought I was sick and he couldn't fix me. 

I told him about my dreams, about the faces in the windows, about the presence I felt standing over me, about the Danger walking through our rooms. The distance betwee us just pushed further.

The nightmares got worse.

My voice drifted ever farther from me. Overcast mornings left fog clinging to the windows and I never really knew whether I was dreaming or awake. I lived in fear of the nightmares. I spoke less and less. My silence was my only weapon against the fear that would reduce me to tears if I tried to share it. He got angrier. I think he felt helpless. 

"You have to tell me what's wrong. Why are you so miserable? It's every day now. I can't live around this." 

"I don't know honey. I'm sure it'll get better. I'm just tired I guess." 

I may have dreamed those conversations. Maybe I dreamed the fights too. Some of it must have happened. Something made him leave. His shouts bounced around in my head for a long time after. 

"You're empty. You're silent. You're looking at things that aren't here. I can't live with you while you vanish. You can't even say what you're afraid of!"

I left the house less and less. The nightmare fog oozed out of my dreams into my waking life. The barrier between the two dissolved in the haze. 

I started sleeping through my days and couldn't sleep at night. I became nocturnal. The nights were simply too threatening. The setting of my nightmares, the men attacking, the fear and Danger, was always night; I had to stay awake then to make sure they didn't become real while I was vulnerably asleep. One night I returned from the grocery around two am, my eyes still reeling from the abrupt shift away from supermarket fluorescents to the inky black road and flashing stop lights. My dog followed me inside, a faithful and trustworthy shadow. I flipped the kitchen light on and swung open the refrigerator door and my skin shifted its' position on my bones. I jerked my body around to put my back against the humming appliance and face the sputtering lightbulb over my kitchen sink. Had I just turned that light on a moment ago? I must have; it only then kicked into a steady emission of watts. That bulb always took a moment to kick into full power illumination. So it must have been off when I got in. My lungs grabbed desperately for more air. I always left that light on when I went out. I'm afraid of the dark. I wouldn't be able to walk through a dark kitchen to get out the door. The refrigerator kept humming behind me. I stood motionless for what felt like a long time before my lungs could accept air deeply and slowly. I'm sure I forgot. I must have turned the light off without thinking and then forgotten about it. 

The nightmare voice made me count the knives in the kitchen drawer while I made tea, and bring one with me to my bedroom.

I fell asleep around eight that morning, and the things I saw in my nightmares blurred the fear the memory of that strange fear I felt in the kitchen. The dog was whining when I woke.