In The Sight of These Hills (Dolan Twins)

Of Dreams and Waking Hours

Chapter 6: Of Dreams and Waking Hours

"I think it's like when you lose something so close to you, it's like losing yourself."
― Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead

Grayson dreamt. In his dream he was walking down a garden pathway. He usually didn't have dreams like these. Usually in his dreams he was getting into "situations" with girls at school or he was flying, or he was switching scenarios throughout the day, his mind adjusting to what his subconscious had subjected him to. Or he was with Princess Leia and they were at a spelling bee, him failing miserably, and suddenly they were in an episode of The Suite Life on Deck. Or he was having nightmares, breath taking ones.

But in this dream, he was surrounded by flowers on either side of him, between a wide dark gray pathway. They were all the same. They were purple lilacs, whole bunches of them planted into the ground. They swung back and forth slightly in a breeze that he could not feel. Part of him was kind of embarrassed to be seeing something so, well, pretty. He was confused too, to be somewhere so vividly stunning, so realistically the image of faultlessness. Something was pulling at him, telling him that wasn't he supposed to be somewhere else?

There was a sprawling forest beyond, all tall maple trees and twisting shrubbery, and he could hear the echoes of birds and the sound of rushing water in the distance, even though he saw no stream. He turned his head upward to look at the forest, realizing it was in the early summer. They weren't the kind of woods you found it New Jersey.

A white-tail doe crossed his path suddenly, emerging from the flowers. He stopped his walking when she did so and watched her as she was about four yards away. He could see each twitch of her body, each muscle. Her frame swayed, her short fur the color of sand paper, her underbelly white as well as her neck. She walked slowly yet precisely on her four thin legs. Her long ears flickered back and forth, and her large black eyes looked at him then, staring into his hazel ones. It felt as though she was looking into his soul, his deepest joys and deepest regrets and deepest desires. She turned her eyes away, bending her neck to graze on the grass that broke through the pathway's thick concrete.

Part of him was admiring her, taking in the surreal beauty, the way she walked without a care in the world. She bent her head down in the tall grass and became one with it as he was one with his dream. It was so amazing to see a creature untainted by civilization.

Another part, like that part that knew what was wrong and what was right, was telling him something different, and it horrified him. He could hear the doe's rushing blood, all salt and earth, and fire, and life, and it tempted him in way he had never experienced before. It was like skipping breakfast and finally getting to the lunchroom to experience the smell of hot, greasy food engulfing the air. Seeing the deer made him hungry, and that confused him. He imaged himself taking off then, impossibly quick and strong and an animal. He was slamming into it, making it call out in startled terror, collapsing onto the walkway, legs kicking out but to no avail.

He attacked it will his blunt white teeth, and it took nothing to pull at the hard tendons on its neck, red squirting in the air like water coming out of a hose pipe. It was all he was, all he cared about. That was all he needed. It was like finally getting to eat lunch.

It was that brutality of it made him flinch. It made the other part of his brain, the part that was admiring it, preserving it in the gray matter to look on later, scream at him. This was so messed up. It was beyond disturbing and all he wanted to do was wake up. He wanted to wake up right then. What the hell was wrong with him?