In it I stood in an endless overgrown field. Everything was still, as if petrified, and an overbearing silence reigned. There was no one—not just near me or within earshot, but anywhere. With the inexplicable logic of dreams, I was certain that I was alone in this world, the last member of a forsaken race. I looked around and started to see rectangular stones reaching out of the grass. They were blank and smooth, and I knew they were tombstones. They were watching me. Their stillness made my heart race with panic; standing there was like an infinite fall. It all seemed so undeniably real, not like a dream but a premonition. I’d feel violated upon waking. Outside, in the darkness of the night, the branch of a chestnut tree would sway in the wind and scratch against my window like a monster demanding admission, and without thinking I’d get out of bed and tiptoe across the cool wooden floor to my mother’s room. We would sleep together, her enveloping me from behind with her arms around my tummy, her stale, warm breath above my head, us breathing in unison, small and large, breathing in and out until the morning when the darkness would be gone and Granny would come to stir us, scolding us as we rubbed clusters of sleep from the corners of our eyes.

“It isn’t right—you two, so close,” she once said, waking us. “What’s to become of a man if he sleeps in the same bed as his lonely mother?” Her voice took on a raspy tone that came directly from her spiky throat.

“Mama, he had a bad dream. And he’s not a man. He’s still only a child,” said my mother, hoisting herself up, taking her hands off me. My grandmother’s face remained bitter.

“He’s growing up, Małgosia, even if you think he’s still a boy. And without a man in the house to show him the ropes, in this house of babas, who knows what kind of a soft man he will become?”

“Could you please not make everything about men?” cried my mother.

“I’m not soft!” I shouted, standing up in bed. “And Mama doesn’t need another man. I can take care of her.”

“And when you go away and marry someone else?” Granny asked, her voice becoming shrill and mean, as if imitating my own. “What will Mummy do then, huh? Will she be all alone?”

“I will never get married,” I said. “Never. I won’t ever leave Mama.”

“See what I mean?” said Granny, looking at my mother. “See what you’re turning the boy into? Abnormal.”