Rowan's Nightmare!

Holden Caulfield was loathing the filthy New York streets beneath his weary feet when my mother’s voice cracked the afternoon in half.

"Calvin!” she screeched, sharp as broken glass, her voice snagging on the lazy summer air. “I thought you were going to take care of that!”

Her words and cigarette smoke drifted over me like the edge of a hot blade—warm, careless, sharp.

I looked up from my book, blinking against the sun’s garrish glare. The light spilled thick and gold across the patchy barren yard, pressing against my skin like warm syrup. I was outside, slouched in a brittle sun bleached pink plastic chair inside the gazebo—its peeling paint flaking like sunburn. Catcher in the Rye rested in my lap. My polka dot bikini and heart shaped glasses screamed in summer vacation. My well loved book’s pages were soft and thumb-worn against my thighs. The words still clinging to the edges of my mind like shadows that didn’t want to leave.

My father’s voice drifted in from somewhere near the house, brittle and petulant.

“Well, Mara,” he snapped, “I had to finish picking up the back porch like you told me to!

The gazebo creaked softly as the breeze pushed through, warm and indifferent. A dragonfly hovered lazily near the edge of my vision, its wings glinting like shards of glass in a cathedral. Somewhere near, the smell of fresh cut grass wafted through the air and a lawn mower hummed—the sound distant, safe.

It could’ve been any summer.
It could’ve been every summer.

But something was wrong.

I glanced around, my eyes snagging on familiar landmarks:
The rust bleeding down the side of an old transformer, staining it like an old wound.
The sagging clothesline swaying slightly, empty clothespins clicking together like tiny brittle bones.
The cracked cement where grass fought its way through, stubborn, resilient and fly-trap green.

All exactly as it should be.

And that’s what made it worse.

“Rowan!” My mother’s voice snapped again, sharp enough to jolt me from the warmth.
Her shadow creeped along the yard taking long spinley strides towards me, soft, thin skinned arms crossed over her chest.
“Help your father with that body!”

Body?

The word dropped into my mind like an anchor tethering me to a turbulent sea. The rough waves of realization sending ripples through everything that had felt safe just moments before.

I sat still, my book limp in my lap, my heart slow to catch up. The sunlight felt too warm now, pressing against me like a clammy hand that lingered too long.

I turned my head—slowly, like the world might crack if I moved too fast—and that’s when I saw it.

Feet.

Just a pair of them, sticking out from under the house—bare, pale, toes curled slightly as if they’d been caught mid-thought. The skin was the wrong color, the ankles smudged with something dark. They didn’t belong there, like a forgotten detail someone forgot to edit out. A glitch in the matrix.

Saliva clung thick and viscous in my throat. I attempted to swallow but it slid against my throat with the friction of sandpaper.

“Fuck, Mom,” I whispered, my voice a low measured growl. “Keep your goddamn voice down. People will hear you!”

But she didn’t care. She never did.

The sunlight felt too bright now, the shadows too sharp. The rust on the transformer, the chipped paint on the gazebo, the sagging clothesline—they were all exactly right.

And that’s what made it wrong.

My photographic memory betrayed me, as it always did—trapping me in the details, forcing me to notice everything. This has to be a dream, and so what if it is? The realism only serves to provide a reflection of the truth, I wasn't even shocked at the notion my parents had a body to get rid of. It made sense like J-Lo's next engagement or global warming— it felt inevitable. Even the faint, greasy outline of my mother’s mustache was perfectly in place.

This was real.
It had to be.

I looked at the feet again.

Who is that?
Did they kill someone?
Did they expect me to help hide the body? Of course they would.

Panic coiled tight in my chest, hot and thick. Memories slipped in—waking up in strange places, hours missing like teeth pulled without anesthesia. Had they drugged me again?

Help, I thought. I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.

Or maybe I did. Maybe I was just ready for this all to be over.
Maybe that’s the part I wasn’t supposed to remember.

I felt sick. The kind of sickness that starts in your spine and shoots down towards your toes.

Somewhere in the house my mom's Romani music played, the violins moaned, the Cimbaloms beat deep, pounding and heady.

“What the fuck did you do?” I whispered, my voice shaking, but not from the heat.

My mother’s face was blank, her eyes flat and bored, like this was just another chore.
“Lazy girl,” she muttered, more annoyed than anything. “Get up and help him—NOW!”

Her words slid under my skin like splinters. My heart thudded, too loud, too fast syncopating with the music.


Smash!

The ground rushed up to meet me.

Drag.

Something rough against my skin, the sun blotted out.

Smash!

My head hit something hard, and the world bled out at the edges.


When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in the yard anymore. The Romani music has disappeared and shifted into something else, like a whisper crafted from moonlight and mist slipping through a sleeping Forrest waiting for me to arrive.

The sky was the color of soft peaches, streaked with ribbons of pink and lavender, clouds like spun sugar shown prismatically along the edges.

I was barefoot, my skin marked by a series of Celtic spirals and knots that wound around my calves like vines climbing up latrice work. Standing in a field that hummed with golden light. Wildflowers swayed around me, tall and bright—daisies the size of dinner plates, their petals soft against my skin. The air smelled like honey and rain, sweet and transcendent.

I giggled—a light, airy sound that didn’t feel like mine. It floated up and away, free and unbothered.

There was no blood here. No bruises. No monsters lurking just out of sight.

I wasn’t Rowan, the girl raised by biological kidnappers masquerading as parents—like some cosmic clerical error had dropped me into the wrong family with no hope of rescue.

Being raised by them felt like serving a life sentence for a crime I didn’t commit.

I counted down the days until my eighteenth birthday like The Count of Monte Cristo marking time in a cell, scratching tally marks into the walls of my brain. Freedom was a distant certainty, and all I had to do was wait.

But here, in this place, I was already free.

I was someone new.
Someone else. I was someone… something different.

Ahead, a house stood—not sagging or broken like the one I knew, but tall and bright and secure, with windows that caught the light like jewels. There was no rust on the walls, no chipped paint, no splintered steps.

I walked toward the house, my bare feet soft against the grass. A hound of Annwn skipped out to greet me. The mythical Irish hound skipped to where I stood. His body white and fluffy, his ears red, he seemed to be stitched together with starlight and spells.

It didn’t bite.

It didn’t bark.

It just was. He stared at me majestically and nodded.

I smiled.

But then, a shadow fell across the grass—long and thin, dark as spilled ink.

“You’re not going anywhere,” a voice whispered, threading through the golden light like a crack in the glass.

The sky flickered.

The house collapsed into a massive sinkhole, pulling the sleeping forest into its void.


And I was falling.


I woke with a gasp, my face pressed into something cold and gritty. Dirt. The metallic tang of blood filled my mouth—thick, hot, real. I tried to move, but my body was heavy, sinking into the ground like it belonged there.

Darkness pressed down, heavy and thick.

Above me, voices drifted—thin, muffled, like they were coming from another world.

“Well, Mara,” my father’s voice, bored and distant, “I had to finish picking up the back porch like you told me to!

“Well, you better finish it,” my mother snapped. “Before someone notices.”

Realization seeped in like water through a crack.

The body under the porch.

It was me.

I tried to scream, but the dust flowed into my throat dry and suffocated the sound before it ever reached the air.

I was the body.

And they hadn't decided how to dispose of me yet.

You can find a playlist I curated for this story here. Taking a deeper dive into Rowan's world and the music that captures it.