Wake Up

The night winds howled outside my rain-covered window, and I wondered what I was doing at Hathaway House.

Hathaway House was a giant prison, a square, broad building, all brown and architecturally astounding, and full of tiny eyes that were called cells. All the lights of all the rooms in Hathaway House, or Halfway House as I jokingly called it, gleamed in the night. Each room contained a ghost or two and were colored according to the emotions they had when dying. Some were blue, some were red, some were gold. At least, that’s the story I liked to tell myself. I was prisoner #1137 out of 4,195, on the floor full of convicts, murderers, adulterers, fornicators, and addicts. And I was all alone, listening to screams and hearing my own internal ones.

The jail cell I had was small and white, devoid of any other besides for me. There was only my cot, my chair, a plant, the dingy shutters and the dusty desk. It rang of a Gothic paradise on what seemed like gray mornings, with a faint sun opening its eye to peer in the room at the dark furniture and me in my sitting chair. Those were the better days. Tonight was not one of them.

I sat in the chair and spoke to the empty air, since I was in want of company. “I dreamt a dream in which I was falling, rolling down large dark spirals the color of tarnished gold. I was falling in the sky, against the background of a vast galaxy. It was an empty space that chanted war and anger. I couldn’t escape. I feared I would be lost forever,” I shook my head and put my weary hands, wrinkled with age and vacant ghost blue veins, on my forehead. Nobody heard me. Or if they did, no one cared. I blabbered until my tongue ran cold of thoughts and feelings and retired to my bed.

The red light of a weary dawn emerged from the light of the window hours later. I lay on a cot, my head ringing of idiosyncratic thoughts, and dreamed of the past; I dreamed of a distant, different me. I desired to call myself Prosper instead of my real name to anybody that would greet me, for once I had done so. I was an old man, who fell in love at a young age, and who had had a couple of children. I had lived in a brown house with grassy plains that sang of late-night mysteries. But I was not devoid of sin, which was most likely why I was in this current trouble; why I was arrested and sent to Hathaway House.

I lay in bed, looked vacantly upwards and drifted, and began to call one I loved.

“Cassie. Cassie.”

“Yes, daddy?” I imagined her bouncing and running, nervous to me, ready to do what I asked. I pretended/imagined I was lying in a fresh, white cot, smiling. Weak but happy.

“Dream of life.”

“Okay, daddy.” A couple of seconds passed which felt like a small package of eternity. “Daddy, you won’t go, will you?” her voice whined to me.

I smiled distantly and looked at the blank white ceiling in front of me. Nobody was there. “No, Cassie, I won’t.”

“Good. Then wake up and hug me,” I remembered her arms wrapping around my torso and the strands of her long brown hair coming dangerously close to my mouth. I woke up to the taste of soil in my mouth, the trace and crumbs of it in an exact line where her hair used to be. It was always nice talking to my children in my dreams.

I gazed around my room as I drifted into sleep and other daydreams. Or memories. Fireflies began to swarm around my dusty lamp which was coated with cobwebs. The hard white tiles gave way to grass and suddenly I began to hear distant music and see bright blue eyes and pale limbs. There were pink flowers and they quivered and shook in anticipation. After some time, noises broke the daydream, and the magic of a faint summer night, and reminded me of my current position and circumstance. In the cell right next to me, dogs howled like human beings and melodies of beauty and death. The dogs were dark and vicious, with soft fur and hard noses, baring their teeth if you found them wandering outside your cell and approached them. They sang of pain and rang of hurt. If I was put on the same floor as animals, I was no better than them.

I could not sleep fitfully when they howled like this, so I set about my daily task. It had to be outside, on the dark plains of Hathaway, where nothing wandered except the devils. Unlike most other prisons, you could leave Hathaway House. But you could never walk past the dark fields to a brighter, sunlit paradise.

I thought I was a fallen human being. At times, I questioned my existence and I pondered if I was in hell or not. To prove it, I gathered and planted seeds that were scattered across the grounds, gray and in the shape of acorns, in the fields outside of Hathaway, which were consistently night, trying to bring life to the dark plains. I knew that no life grew in hell. I hoped that God would see my plight and notice me and like a fire, bring warmth. If I failed like all the other times, I would fall prostrate on the soil, and in the early morning of what felt like this eternal night, return to my cell until I gathered enough willpower to do it all again.

Upon my familiar spot on the ground, a distance away from Hathaway, I set about my task. I uncovered a small hole to plant one of these special seeds in, mercy seeds I called them, and I put one in. If a fire started to burn, brighten, and warm me, it meant I was saved. I somehow knew this, from the start of my sentence, when I was ushered in by a gremlin prison guard and left to serve out my time. Left to love myself.

The soil ate it up, white teeth emerging, and greedily devoured the seed into its stomach. Vines immediately began to sprout, and a flower made of fire began to rise, about the size of my second child, Timothy. I raised my hands to it, and it didn’t scorch them. Yet I wasn’t warmed. It brightened my face and died the next minute.

Next, it was Cassie, and her bright little figure danced away as soon as it was born.

I tried again. This time the shape emerged into the shape and figure of my lovely wife, Maddie. I could even see more details than with the other two. How she wept tears of fire and looked ashamed of me as she turned to the side. She burned away and dissipated before I could even hold her hand.

Infuriated, I walked the grounds of Hathaway House, until I stood in front of it defiantly, my person encased in its black, dusty gates. I yelled my most courageous war yell, so loud that even some of the ghosts in the rooms who were floating about confused and worried, those faint souls, looked at me. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I was asking for a lightning bolt.

And Hathaway House stood like a giant, menacing, intimidating, and ready to beat down on me. It was not going to hug me like the little girl in my daydream and it told me to submit. The House’s anger bellowed in the smoke above it and emitted the chill of a cold winter’s evening. The sky, a distant witness, in its huddled brown outfit, smoked limp gray clouds to numb emotions. And I sank to my knees and breathed it in, weeping and baring my arms out in anguish. I fell and slept on the cold concrete road, still damp from last night’s rain. When I woke up, I no longer cared about escaping Hathaway House.

Here at Hathaway House, I am neither man nor devil. I am, I was, and I am not. I suppose the songs will still ring, and the faint magic will go on, and my life as a man, with a family, hopes, and opportunities will exhale and die but ever live in my mind and memories.

Yet there is a blue flower, the color of the blue morpho butterfly in fairytales, in the well-worn pot beside my bed. I found it stuck in a drawer away from any light. The plant stayed alive without my tending.

Maybe it means something. Maybe it means that Hathaway House is the daydream. And all I have to do is wake up.