The Lights In the Sky

Chapter 19

You know, sometimes it seems like sitting around the house for a few days with nothing to do would be great. I think that feeling usually comes to me at the end of January or beginning of February when it's been snowing for so long that you can't even remember what the sun looks like anymore. When you step outside and your nose is frozen in about fourteen seconds. Everybody at school is just depressed and in a bad mood all the time. All the energy is drained. That's the time of year when you start to hate the people who walk around smiling because you just can't understand how anybody could possibly be that happy when everything's dead. But have you ever actually done it? I did for winter break a couple times and it really sucks. The first day isn't too bad because you sleep in and don't feel too bad about being lazy. But then you realize that you should probably be accomplishing something with your time and without school or a job or football, there's not much to accomplish. And if you're a guy my age, you get distracted by other things and when you get caught up in that too much, you feel even more guilty. Well, when I got suspended, that wasn't on my mind at all, but I was pretty much sitting around doing nothing for too long. Eventually, the dreams got stronger.

The scars on my back were just about healed by that point. So was the sunburn. In fact, I would probably have the best tan at the high school, mostly because it was almost Thanksgiving and the days were way too short. That's so depressing, isn't it? You still have all this energy, but the world is giving up.

I was no longer being lifted up in the dreams. I was always in that clearing. But the more I had the dream, the more realized the scene became. There was the snow and the trees, but then there was a puddle in the middle. It grew each time I had the dream. I started to sleep all the time. I took naps in my room or on the couch. I even fell asleep in the front lawn once. It wasn't like I was popping Mom's sleeping pills, either. I would be sitting there, or standing there, doing whatever, and my eyes would start to get heavy and I would find the closest place I could. And I would be in the clearing. Soon, the puddle was the size of a car. Then a bus. Then it was deeper. The night before I had to go back to school, I was standing next to a large pond. Snow was falling hard. The moon was full. There was another light to the side of the moon, a reddish glow. Maybe a planet. Maybe not.

I was cold. Wearing a thin, gray hoodie and blue basketball shorts. I knew the outfit. It was what I wore when I lounged around the house. I had tennis shoes on but no socks. I was always being watched. That thing standing in the trees. The thing that looked like me.

Suddenly, I understood where I was standing. Remember when I told you about that morning with Frank watching the sunrise? And how we could see the patch of trees behind our house. There's a dirt road about a half of a mile behind our place. Past that, there's a field. Beyond it, there are some trees. And a clearing with a pond. My dad and I used to go out there all the time and dig for Indian beads. One time I wore a tank top and he saw one of my first armpit hairs and we didn't go back to look for Indian beads anymore.

In my dream that night, the other person approached me. I'd leave out the part about him being naked, but I feel like that's a necessary detail, so I'll just say that there wasn't anything inappropriate about it. My dad has a lot of cousins and when we go to reunions and stuff, it's not uncommon for a toddler to run past totally naked. It was like that. Innocent. Except this one time that I was walking to the park with my little cousin and he just stopped right in the middle of the road and whipped it out and started peeing right there. He didn't even warn me. That was weird. But this wasn't like that.

I wasn't facing him. The person in the dream, I mean, not my cousin. I wasn't facing him, either, though. So, yeah, my back was to him but I knew he was there and I knew what he looked like. He started walking up to me. His feet are probably freezing, I thought. But he didn't seem to flinch. He stopped walking when his shoulder was even with mine. We didn't make eye contact, but if we did, it would have been like looking in a mirror. He spoke out loud in a hushed, forced whisper.