I dreamt about my sister, dead these many years. It seemed she was in
a place of ghosts. In my dream I put my face up to hers and kissed her
cheek and said, "I'll always be your sister." But she turned her face
away and closed her eyes. Her cheek was cold.
I said, "Do you want me to take you away, dear? Come, come! Let us
go!" But she only looked sad and didn't speak.
My son was with me but in my dream he was a young boy. I mean, my son
at seven, not the way he is now. He was impatient with my sighs and
tears and wanted to get away from that place. He was bored.
I gave him a pencil and told him, "Draw!" He took the pencil
obediently. He drew. But it seemed to cost him a great effort.
Now and then I would peep at what he was drawing: a series of empty
rectangles. I asked him, "Why don't you put people in your drawings?
See, here, and here, and here. They are all around us!"
He looked up and slowly I saw understanding dawn on his face. He
filled his drawings with the outlines of people. I understood then
that he, too, could see them, these ghosts.
I told my sister: You are under a spell. You should never have gotten
married. She nodded, but she didn't seem to want to do anything about
it. Eventually I left, I left my sister there in that cold white house
in the middle of a barren plain. The landscape looked like that of a
northern country, all bare brown fields as if struck by winter. All
white trees.
In the back seat of my car was a white box. It made an angry buzz. I
wanted to throw it away but I couldn't because I knew somehow that
there was something in that box that belonged to my sister.
When I got to my own house, after a journey of some distance, I took
the box out but now I felt it contained something evil. I wanted to
get away from the box but I felt some sense of loyalty, too, because
in that box, possibly, were pictures of my sister.
Eventually I forced myself to open it. Inside was a collection of
photographs. My sister was in all of them, but around her were people
I didn't recognize. They were on either side of her, staring straight
at the camera. My legs felt numb. There was a terrible ache in my
chest and my cheeks were cold.
A leaf had turned. A leaf had fallen. It was a Thursday in September,
I saw from the calendar on my desk. The 25th of September.
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