Dream Mother

Fiction by Andrew Bertaina

Mother and I are driving in an immense valley towards large piles of blue rocks, worn away by wind and water. Now the rocks are recast, as our bodies all are one day, into something new, animals from another dimension. I can’t remember why we’re driving into the valley. I think it might have something to do with the stars, the way the empty valley turns them into a glittering bowl unfamiliar to city dwellers like me, who think the sky has three of them at most.
 
You don’t know any of them, do you?
 
The stars?
 
She points out the major constellations—the Ursas and Saturn blinking red. She tells me about Caroline Hershel, the sister of the inventor of the telescope.
 
Oh, she was just as clever as William was. Same old story across the pages of history though. You know that. Mother taps the window with her long red fingernails.
 
I’d ask her to stop, but the truth is, I don’t want her to go. I want to hold her inside this dream as a scene inside a snow globe.
 
What are we doing?
 
Searching for water, she says, scanning the horizon. I’d like to grow a garden here.
 
Here?
 
Yes, she says irritably. Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.
 
For a moment, I wonder if the woman in the car is actually my mother or if she’s only someone who reminds me of her. 
 
We drive on the narrow stretch of two-lane road. Mother flips with the stations until she finds an old country song, I used to include on mix tapes during college. She sings along, and her voice sounds ragged, full of maggots and worms, things in the back of her throat, trying to creep out.
 
But I’m not Bing Crosby either. Who am I to complain?
 
What do you think you’ll grow?
 
Grow? She says, turning in the car to look at me. The dead of course. People like me. There’s no room for any of us down there anymore. Population boom, you know. Malthus. The whole nine yards. The dead need somewhere to go too, you know.
 
The valley seems as good of a spot to grow the dead as any. A part of me wants to ask just what goes into the process, but I’ve never had much interest in logistics. I’m more of an ideas person. I scan the blue rocks, shaped like coyote pups growing from a cactus, a bear with the tail of a dolphin, and the giant rock monster from The Never-Ending Story, which had terrified me as a child.
 
In the rocks and valley, I can’t find anything that signifies where the dream is going. I know, even in the dream that dreams are a kind of portal into the subconscious mind, a way to access your thinking, like swimming down into a very deep well, hidden beneath the blue rocks of any old day.
 
Son, mother says.  Are you leaving her?
 
I assume she’s talking about my first wife, a woman she’d privately loathed for not being anything like her. I think of saying something about Freud, but the moment doesn’t seem right. Of course, no moments ever seem quite right in dreams, misshapen as they are, cockeyed and large like a Gauguin.
 
I wouldn’t leave her, mother says, pulling her skeletal arm up and blowing cigarette smoke out the window. It slithers through the air. I suspect the smoking it isn’t for pleasure, but the aesthetic. In the distance, California golden poppies glitter and shake in an otherwise undetectable breeze.
 
 Overhead, a red-tailed hawk is circling, eyeing sparrows, it dives, and we hear a tremendous shriek and a wild dusting of feathers.
 
It’s a metaphor, mother says.
 
About what? I ask.
 
Mother seems to have lost her train of thought because she asks after my writing.
 
Never liked it, she said. Too much whining about your parents, and the sadness, you know? How did you ever expect me to send that to my friends? Why can’t you write a love story? She shakes her head, and I feel ashamed. I want to apologize for writing about her so much, for using her life as though it were my own, but I say nothing.
 
The valley is slowly shifting, blurring, and going soft focus, as though someone is turning the lens on a camera. I sense a movement away form the dream and I try to wrap my mind around the metaphor of the hawk and the sparrow.  
 
In a way, the metaphor of the sparrow and hawk was like my life outside of the dream world. I couldn’t make any real sense of it either. But it often felt as though the answer was close at hand if only I could learn to interpret life correctly. I wish sometimes that someone would cast the talus of the sheep and interpret the meaning for me.
 
The world is too much with us, mother says, and we’re stuck inland. When she turns back around to face me, I see tiny bird feather in her mouth, grey speckled bits of sparrow.
 
Why did you eat the bird, mother?
 
But she’s gone back to being a hawk sailing on the warm currents of wind. I stand there with my confusion while the sun lowers itself, resting briefly in the arms of a live oak. It is a bright and clean day. A day as good as any for crying.
 
******************************************************************************
 
When I awake, I’m still at my lover’s house.  She asks me what I’ve dreamed of, and I tell her nothing. She smiles back at me, warmly. I walk across the living room, half-dazed, until I reach her in the bathroom. She kisses me, and I pick up the toothbrush I’d agreed to leave at her place just last week.
 
As I brush my teeth, I walk back into her living room, waiting for the dream to clear. And I stare out the window at a solitary elm, full now in spring, sparrows darting from branch to branch.
​

Andrew Bertaina

Andrew Bertaina's short story collection, One Person Away From You (2021), won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020).  His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, The Normal School, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC.