In my dream, I am flying.
I am a bird with outstretched wings, soaring and swooping above the waves of a turquoise sea. I am dancing in a cloud-free sky, looking down at the world below and thinking how very small we all are.
Consciousness stirs me a little, enough to permit the sound of a van door sliding closed to invade my dreams. The confusion it creates smashes the sky. Huge, jagged shards of it start to fall down all around me, as though the world were raining blue glass. I don’t fly fast enough, and some of the fragments tear into my wings, red blood staining my white feathers. I start to feel heavy, as though I can’t hold myself up. I decide to dive down into the sea, seeking safety beneath the waves, but they have grown rough, crashing onto the rocks below. The churning water has turned black, and as I continue to dive, getting closer and closer, white spray spits up in my face, blinding me from what lies beneath. I hit the surface hard, feeling the bones in my nose and cheeks shatter first. My body is bent and broken, and the impact has left me folded in on myself, so that I’m even smaller and more insignificant than I used to be.
I open one eye, just enough to make out that the sea has turned into green carpet liner, and that I have been rolled inside. I stay awake long enough to know that I am broken.
When I stir again, I can hear someone coming. I try to lift my birdlike self off the floor, but I can no longer move. I can’t even lift my head and it feels like I’ll never be able to fly again. I black out before I can see or feel any more.
Consciousness revisits and is a little less patient with me this time. My head is throbbing, and it takes a while to remember what happened, and then to wonder where and when I am now.
It’s dark. Completely pitch-black.
My hands are tied behind my back and something is stuffed inside my mouth, so that I can’t close it or speak.
My legs are bent at the knee, tucked up behind me, and when I try to move I realize that I am inside some kind of box. At first I think I am in a coffin, and the idea that I have been buried alive makes it hard to breathe. I start to cry. Tears and snot and drool from the sides of my open mouth stain my face in the darkness. I try to calm myself with logic; the box is too small to be a coffin, and for a brief moment I feel a tiny bit better, but the voice of fear is too loud inside my ears.
It could be a child’s coffin.
I realize that although whatever is shoved inside my mouth has stopped me from speaking, I can still make a noise. The muffled scream that comes out of me sounds so primal that I think that someone or something else must be making it. It seems harder to breathe than it did before, and I wonder how much oxygen there can be in a space this small. I try to kick my feet against the side of the box, and when I scream again, the lid opens.
I blink a few times into the light, my eyes trying to translate the silhouette looming above me.
“Hold on, Baby Girl, we’re almost home,” says a voice that changes in my ears with every distant word. At first the voice belongs to Maggie, then to my brother, then back again. He holds a cloth over my nose. I try to keep my eyes open, but they’re too heavy. I think it is Maggie who holds my hand for a little while before I hear the lid of whatever I am in slide closed, clicking shut.
I am a broken bird again.
I cannot open my eyes or sing or fly away.
I am sinking down farther and farther beneath the surface of a cold black sea.