“Oh, it has. We just haven’t seen it yet. Everything’s always changing, in flux.” Joyce crossed her arms across her chest, a posture that made Morgan uncomfortable, so great was its kinship to the dead in their eternal rest. “I don’t know if there is a message in this whole thing, if there is any kind of lesson to be learned, but if there is, perhaps that’s it: that nothing is ever stable, that we’re never in control, no matter how much we believe ourselves to be.”

Morgan was visibly deflated. Thinly, she asked, “Do you know how all this started?”

“No idea. But I think this…nightmare, vision, whatever you want to call it, has been around forever. I don’t think we create the dream, we just experience it, get claimed by it. It takes from us, but weirdly enough, it gives to us too. I’ve had other children, other possessions. But I don’t choose them. I just kind of…observe them.”

“Like in a dream?” Morgan asked.

“Like in a dream. One thing I have figured out is that you had to have met someone in waking life before they can be pulled into this. Sort of like the way you dream about ordinary people, even the dead, when you dream. Your mother used to do my hair, as you know. That’s how she got dragged in.”

Joyce’s subsequent shudder was so violent that Morgan asked her what she was thinking. “That man, the one in the yard…I think I saw him panhandling in the alley behind the house last week. I even gave him a five…”

Despite her confusion, Morgan felt that further questions were futile.

The room donned silence like a garment, flaunted it for too long. The doorbell’s chiming broke the spell. Morgan flinched, gasped, and then rose to answer it. Joyce reached across the table and gripped Morgan’s arm. “Don’t. It will be the police looking for witnesses to the accident. We’re not getting involved.”

There was a knock, then a stillness that lasted well into the afternoon. By then Morgan had migrated to the living room, where she stared at the television with its volume deliberately high. Joyce remained in the kitchen, smoking until the package was depleted.

Out of frustration and defiance Morgan rose from the sofa with a huff. She gathered her rolled mat and her petite gym bag.

“Where are you going?” Joyce asked her.

“Yoga. It’s Wednesday.”

“You can’t.”

Morgan shrugged. “I say I can.”

The jangling of keys, the rattling of Joyce’s nerves; she bolted toward the front door. “Wait! Don’t go. It’s not safe, do you understand? Not safe!”

Morgan pretended that the woman’s blubbering, her clinging grip, didn’t faze her. “I’m not going to sit here and rot like some prisoner.”

“Well then, I’m coming with you.”

*