Twelve days ago
Isabelle slept fitfully. The violent dream that had been haunting her for the past week again pushed its way through the fog of sleep. A tall, older man was walking down the street, his hands jammed in a worn coat. He walked quickly, shoulders hunched against the cold. She still couldn’t make out his face, his features hidden from view by the upturned collar of his coat.
Two men appeared. They wanted the tall man’s wallet and phone. He stopped, shook his head, and strode away from them. The men followed, like eager street dogs promised a meal.
The night smelled of stale food and wet tar.
Everything about the dream was clearer tonight, sharper, more in focus than before.
The thinner man flicked open a knife. The other one, a snake tattoo curling up his wiry right arm, did the same. The men circled the tall man, looking for a gap to launch their attack. The thin man jumped forward and stabbed him in the back. The tall man turned and punched him in the face.
The thin man staggered back, blood on his face. His partner with the tattoo jammed his blade in the tall man’s lower back, again and again. The tall man fell onto the sidewalk, hands blindly seeking the wounds in his back, trying to stem the bleeding.
The moon was so bright, the light from the streetlamps and the shopfronts so prominent, Isabelle could see everything in detailed slow-motion.
A door swung open. Someone ran down the sidewalk, screaming.
It was her. Isabelle.
The two men fled as she screamed.
She rushed to the tall man on the cold concrete and cradled his head in her lap.
For the first time in a week of dreaming the same jumble of images, she could finally see who it was: Horace Gibson, her boxing instructor.
There was blood on her hands, red, slick, and thick. The smell of copper stuck to her tongue, slid down her throat, and made her gag.
She screamed again.
Woke.
Her breath rushed over her lips, hurried and full of panic.
Breathe. Just breathe. She sat up, head between her knees.
She was too scared to open her eyes. Last night, when she did so after the dream, the room closed in on her, then spun away like some computer manipulated image from a B-grade movie.
If she’d maybe made more of an effort with Jam, her next-door neighbor, she could go for help, but she’d never been good at asking for help or making friends.
She felt the bile rush into her mouth. She stumbled blindly to the toilet and threw up the tomato soup she’d eaten earlier. She heaved over the bowl, eyes still closed. Her legs were too shaky to hold her. She sank down to her knees next to the toilet.
Get up. Open your eyes and get up.
She had to find Horace. She’d recognized the sidewalk where the mugging had happened, the bright red neon sign of the sex shop next to the boxing gym.
The dream was too vivid not to be real.
She wiped at her mouth and stumbled to the front door, her eyes closed against the nauseatingly bright light. She padded down the hallway on her bare feet. The stairs were to the right. She felt for the railing, almost tumbling down the first step.
Focus. You can do this.
“Probability theory,” she started to recite as she descended the stairs one by one, “is a branch of mathematics concerned with analysis of random phenomena. The outcome of a random event cannot be determined before it occurs, but it may be any one of several possible outcomes. The actual outcome is considered to be determined by chance.”
The concrete under her feet told her that she’d made it downstairs. She breathed through her nose, bile rising in her throat again. She fumbled out the building door and onto the sidewalk.
She knew it would be quiet on the street. Didn’t know how she knew it. Same way she knew it was three forty-five, although she had no watch to tell her the time.
She walked, trailing her hand over one cold shopfront window after the other. She counted the shops. Three, four, five. She opened her eyes.
The sidewalk was empty. No Horace. No blood. No bad men.
The city and its buildings collapsed onto her, the lights exploding into her mind. Her chest tightened, her breath raced. She knelt down, digging into the sidewalk.
A man stepped around her. “Fucking junkie.”
She started to shiver. She was freezing. The cold crept through her bare feet, up her legs and into her stomach, her head. She struggled upright, leaned against the nearest shop window, and started to stagger back to her apartment.
Inside her building, she fell onto her hands and knees and crawled up the stairs.
She opened her front door, threw up on the threadbare carpet, curled into a ball, and waited for darkness to descend.