Lisa Thornton
The boy I met on a rooftop in Nepal, the one who pushed a rowboat onto the lake in the middle of the night while monkeys screamed at us from the trees, calls me in a dream. He wants to talk about snow. It rains and rains, he says, until one day it’s snow.
Cicadas whir outside my dream window. The boy’s voice coming through the old-fashioned phone mounted to the wall is the same as it was in real life, medium-pitched and nasal, saved in some crevice in my brain I can’t reach when I’m awake. Some crevice that catalogues my life and replays it scrambled up in my subconscious. Dreams are funny like that.
I have the one that I’m flying. Doing the thing we all want to do but can’t. Over fields like patchwork quilts, Superman arms out front. I feel like I’m awake when I’m doing it. Like I have the hang of it. My brain sometimes serves me my first love, young and preserved. He sits sheepishly while I stand over him. I’m sorry, he says.
But some dreams don’t go like that. Some of them dangle and tease. Like the one where I’m in the house we lived in before my parents split up. Before my mother said you can stay here with your father, I guess. Before all the stepparents came and left. Before their kids became my siblings and then we didn’t know what we were anymore after our parents split up, too. Before other people became potential losses to be weighed, sorted, and calculated. I go into the bathroom and when I come out, I’m in the house next door, and this continues, bathroom after bathroom, as I pass through every house in the neighborhood trying to get back to my family.
The dream oak tree in my dream yard moves slightly with the dream breeze. If the boy and I were to ride on top of that bumpy bus from Pokhara to Varanasi again, our young skin taught and sweaty in the midday heat, would I let his knee touch mine? If we were to walk along the ghats of the Ganges, the air smelling of ash and incense, would I lace my fingers through his? If I received a letter from the boy, months after we flew back to our homes, saying maybe we should try being something more than tourists, something more like lovers, would I put the letter in a shoe box and never respond to it or would I drive that old blue Subaru to Minnesota?
I wrap the dream phone cord around one of my dream fingers. I know now that I’m good enough for someone like him. I’ve learned that not everyone leaves and even if they do it doesn’t mean something is wrong with me. All these years later, I finally understand snow. But I can’t speak. In this dream, I grip the hard plastic phone and open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
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Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse living in the Midwest. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules and more literary magazines. She was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and Bridport Flash Fiction Prize in 2023. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her fiction and Best of the Net anthology for her poetry. She can be found on Twitter/X and Bluesky @thorntonforreal.