“I am not aware of what might be unusual about me.”

“Then how can you see what is unusual and what is not unusual, and make wild claims about being in no way out of the ordinary?”

“I can’t see what is unusual and what is not unusual. What I am familiar with, not that I know it, but what I am familiar with, is what is usual.”

“Then your vision is at fault,” the administrator says with finality, his mouth snapping shut.

The administrator raised his hand abruptly, the ring flashing in the daylight, and the man couldn’t help himself. He twisted his head around on his stiff and aching neck to look at the administrator. The administrator reached out and touched the man’s something on the side of the man’s head. The man was staring at the administrator’s face when his vision went out, all at once, without the slightest sensation, forever.

Oneiropaths

Oneiropaths

“I’M NOT SLEEPING well,” Amelia said, in answer to my question. “May I tell you about it, or do you have to go?”

“I don’t have to be back at the office until four,” I answered.

It was barely past noon. Amelia sighed and permitted her head to droop onto her arm. Her large, bruised eyes were glassy, unfocused.

“Do you remember when we used to tell each other our dreams?” she asked.

We had been friends for so long that I couldn’t clearly remember how I had first met her. I dimly recalled that our mothers had been friends; and we must have lived in the same neighborhood, perhaps on the same block. I could remember her as a little girl, skipping around the corner of her house, her white dress flashing in the sun, fleeting afterimages of her dress capering in pink and teal. We didn’t attend the same school. We were never in love. We were simply in each other’s lives, like the trees and the sky above the city, like the city itself. I remember a park we used to visit. There was a shallow fishpond we liked. And there was a whimsical statue of a fish with staring eyes, who gushed water through a wild leer, not far from the big round rose planter. Even now, the memory of those days wells up in me, but what I remember are the screens and billows of dazzling sunlight, the dry warmth of the air and the fragrance of baking stone and pine needles, Amelia’s high, clear voice sifting through the glare, her hand in mine. Like another breath.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It must have been a long time ago.”

She nodded, eyes lowered, then pinched the bridge of her nose with a grimace.

“Are you having nightmares?” I asked.

A troubled look came into her face then, and she shook her head, waving her hand.