“The dream always starts the same way.
Reflection distorted in the water. Fluorescent lights. Bedsheets soaked, draped over tile, around corners and doorways, the midnight skin of some primordial phantom. I can’t. It echoes from air vents, from cracks in the walls. Pews scattered in the hallways, vanishing, reappearing. I can’t. Louder every time. I never see him, but his voice draws me to a bathroom, where the doors to all the stalls swing slowly, endlessly. He’s breathing, whispers a lower voice. A groan from the air vents. The metal grates break away in the flood. The bathroom becomes an ocean. Shards of broken glass in the waves, rising and glinting and swelling and crashing. But I dream something new this time. I wash up on the sand in the dead of an encumbered and starless night. A bonfire in the distance. There’s a body, face down. I crouch beside it, whisper, You don’t want to take care of me anymore. It stirs, and I wake.”