Sabine's Dreams  •  Fiction  •  October 2018 

Nights are short. She wakes in the morning from a dream painted orange and fluorescent white. Zest and peel — the sky was lit up at night, orange trees coating the sky in frayed sweet fire, a smell sickeningly sweet overpowering the underlying stench of fruit-rot.

On a Saturday night, lips stained with vodka, she dreamed of clouds dissolving into white powder and the world being covered by it, almost like snow, but dry — the white sands of the sky turned the earth light blue, no ocean anymore, and in her dream she took off her shoes and walked across the whole planet.

On a Monday she fell asleep on the bus and dreamed that her father came to visit — he arrived early by train and left a box of Ecuadorian chocolates at her door before turning into a little red bird and flying home.

She has coffee with her father in her dreams, at least two nights a week. She is always on time.

On a Thursday she wakes again from dreaming of the man at the bakery down the street, asleep at a desk, stacks of papers and books coated in a light dusting of glittering white sugar.

Sometimes in the winter, she dreams about living in a tiny house made of mud and paper. She wears a yellow dress and plants medical supplies in her back garden. She doesn’t particularly like those dreams, but they seem to come back every year. In the summer she has dreams about cool water, interlocking pools of vivid blue and glasspane clarity. She dreams about a swimsuit her mother had, orange with yellow dots on, a loose skirt wrapped across the front. She swims with schools of tiny golden fish. She eats cake with hot honey in the center. She drinks milk infused with moonlight. Other summer nights she dreams of being dragged down to the bottom of the cold grey ocean. Her hair turns white and falls away. There are no fish. Her hands are soft and wrinkled, but she is not old. She sees her family eating dinner under tiny yellow lights above the water as she sinks deeper. Her mother sings until, in the dream, she closes her eyes and, in the real world, she wakes covered in thick beaded sweat and an infinite blanket of heat.

On a Tuesday in May she dreams that the man from the bakery wakes her from sleep and makes her a plate of tiny, peppered eggs and puffy brown toast with cactus fruit jam that glowed like a beetle’s wing in the sun, along with a tiny cup of midnight blue espresso that tasted like rainwater.

On a Wednesday she walks home late at night with a girl in her class whom she tells about a dream in which she wore ballet shoes made of coffee cake. She buys a slice of it from the bakery in the morning. The man at the bakery is shy when he sees her. He dreamed of her last night. She sees her father’s face again in a dream on a Friday, floating in her window. There are tears in his eyes. He laughs and fades into the night. It’s raining hard when she wakes up. It’s sunny when she wakes again.

On the night before the next Wednesday, she dreams that the man at the bakery delivers her a tan-yellow suitcase of her mother’s clothes. He says he’s had it for too long.