Shamrock Samurai

10 | NIGHTMARES

All I needed were ZZZ's and good dreams. Nightmares found me instead.

They never begin. You're always just IN dreams, right? In my dream I roamed through a hazy landscape. White light shone through the surrounding mist. Then I came to a graveyard. The mist cleared around a section of tombstones, my sister's grave the centerpiece. A tear escaped my eye.

I hadn't thought about her except for fleeting memories I let drift away. Life and death situations make you think about, well... death. I missed my sister so much. I heard footsteps on my left.

There she was, my sister, a little older than I remembered. She had Anne of Green Gables-red hair, but it was beautiful just the same.

"Hey Bro," she said, like a surfer. That always made her smile.

"Hey Sis," I started, stunned for words.

"Been a while."

"Yeah."

"How's my Aiden?"

"Growing up."

"You takin care of him?"

"Trying to. Mom is mostly."

"Gavin?"

"He moved up to Washington by himself."

She walked as she spoke, moving under a large stone archway held up by rectangular pillars. Stone skulls stared from the pillars in bas relief. The space between the pillars was very wide, like a massive maw open to the living. As I observed it a raven alighted on the archway and croaked.

My sister spoke up again, calling my attention back to her. "That doesn't surprise me. He was always such an introvert. How's dad?" she asked.

"You haven't seen him?"

"What do you mean?" she said.

"Never mind," I said. It was only a dream anyways.

She pursed her lips. After a long pause she said, "You need to avenge my death."

"Why does that fall to me?"

"Why doesn't it? Sometimes life happens. Sometimes responsibility falls in your lap."

"I'm already knee deep into some serious stuff Sis."

"I'm stuck Sean. You're stuck. Stuck until you resolve it. Kill the monster that killed me."

"I've got my own monsters coming after me now." This was getting irritating. "This is a dream."

"Might be," she said. "But the guilt is real. You know my death is your fault."

"Mine?"

"If you'd been a good brother, you might have rescued me. You failed to be there for me."

Tears ran down my face. "I don't need this right now."

"You think you're this macho guy, but you couldn't pull me out of the water."

"Stop..."

"All you had to do was lift me out."

"Don't go there."

My sister vanished and someone else screamed at me. "You killed me!"

It was her, the Banshee. She peered over the edge of a tombstone at me. I felt the Chaos emanating from her and it repulsed me. She flickered between her three forms like a strobe light.

Old Hag.

Middle-aged woman.

Hag.

Forever 21 model.