holly taylor

DON’T WAKE US WHEN WE’RE DREAMING

Prudence took on work as an after-school nanny to a recently widowed woman and her two daughters. She was unemployed and falling behind on bills. 

“Get them off the bus, play with them, and give them a snack,” their mother instructed, “and if they’re having one of their fits let them alone.” 

Akari was fair, with straight black hair cut to her chin. Her younger sister Chiaki had a darker complexion and curly black hair hanging down her back. 

It was January. Dreary and damp. Their house was kept at a low temperature to conserve on the propane bill. Prudence wore heavy sweaters. She wore the same pair of long underwear underneath her skirts. She wore wool socks with clunky boots. Many houses in that region, within their walls, were bare of anything except screws and planks and dust and mice. Insulation was not used to keep out the cold. The walls were thin. The girls’ mother worked extra hours to provide the girls with after-school sweets and to pay for the extra help with caring for them. She had taken on work as a seamstress at the local bridal shop. Her own mother had taught her how to cut out dress patterns, how to baste, how to tack rick rack and zippers and lace before securing them in stitches with the machine’s bobbing needle. 

The girls’ father had stepped in front of a train the previous December. Prudence did not know this at the time she accepted the position. 

______

Akari once said “I’m glad we can jump on the bed without him yelling at us”; then, at a later time, “never wake Father when he’s sleeping.” 

Prudence pieced the death together based on these statements, as well as a visit to the local library to scan newspaper clippings. 

The librarian helped her locate the December papers. She’d biked past the accident herself, as she called it, after the day’s work. There were ambulances and police and fire trucks and a gaggle of greedy onlookers. The librarian herself, included. Though, as the woman explained, she’d been interested purely for journalistic intentions. She didn’t consider herself a looksy-loo like all the others. The girls’ father had been drinking steadily at the pub nearby and stepped outside for a smoke, as the onlookers at the pub recalled. There was no set schedule for the train, so he couldn’t have planned to do what he did. His death seemed to be the result of a whim, a chance impulse, his fine motor skills and reasoning dulled by the alcohol. 

He’d been a failed musician, a failed writer, then a failed English tutor. The news clipping reported he’d started a small business selling arts antiquities and that too had failed. Every other storefront in town was bare, its insides stripped of furniture and goods, because the businesses had gone bankrupt. The local economy was struggling. Perhaps because of the discomfort of the steady drizzle, the streets emptied of the town’s inhabitants by dusk. The only consistent sound that could be heard was the issue of the train as it passed over the tracks, carrying heavy cars of ore and lumber. 

Their mother hadn’t sold off the art collection yet. Pieces of it were scattered throughout the living room--a lesser known Impressionist’s paintings, Cycladic figurines of female forms with bulging rears and breasts, still life watercolors of swamps and rivers and country roads, hand-painted Dutch cottages arranged into a country village on the mantel, complete with tiny dogs and children being pulled on sleds. 

______

Akari was a rather gifted drawer. Each day she drew a portrait of Prudence and signed her name at the bottom with a flourished A. She handed over the picture without comment. The images stacked up in the passenger seat of Prudence’s station wagon next to bits of paper, past due bills, receipts, with blotted merlot lipstick on the edges. 

Some days Prudence’s mouth was grotesquely large for its face, the lips swollen and cracked with lines. Or the eyes were crossed, scraggles of hairs sticking up from her scalp in a manner that caused Prudence to self-consciously walk into the bathroom and compare the image Akari had drawn with the one that stared back from the mirror. 

Some days the image was beautiful and doll-like with a delicate arrangement of freckles just over the bridge of the nose, blue eyes, long lashes, porcelain skin, free of blemish. 

Prudence had been living alone. She hadn’t been sleeping. She wondered if it showed. Under her eyes, perhaps, as her mother had always warned her it would. Or in the dullness of her hair, once so lustrous and full. As a child, she’d never been permitted to slouch, to wear dirty or unseemly clothes, or to leave the house without her hair combed into waves. She wore ankle-length dresses and jumpers to school each day, with bobby socks and black patent leather shoes. 

Prudence’s mother would stand behind her while she played the piano and pull her shoulders back, duck a hand under her chin to prevent a double chin from forming, tapping firmly to discourage a slack jaw, place a finger behind her neck to show where a hunchback could form without careful attention to posture. Her mother showed her how to twist her hips before bed to form a petite waist, which oils and creams to rub into her skin to keep it smooth and supple. 

Winter is a fallow time. A time for rest and refrain. A time where the skin loses its softness, when your hairbrush fills with clumps of hair, when the shower drain clogs with it. When your flanks wither and your appetite wanes.  

The cupboards were bare at the apartment where Prudence lived by herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to eat. She simply lost her appetite once she opened the front door, without fail. There was a smell of decay in the walls, along the floorboards, under the faucet. Perhaps some sort of fungus was growing in the rooms from the cold and damp. She suspected there was a black mold growth, a dark spot moving across the space. An encroachment. This was a dream she had: a spot of black growing until it became a muddy shadow, then a black box on top of her chest. 

She’d been losing weight. Her once-full breasts had hardened into knots on her chest. Enough was enough: if she could locate the source of the smell her appetite would return. She ripped open all the cabinets, the space under the kitchen sink, poked in each corner of the closet, peered under her sleigh bed, lifting under the curtain rods. There was nothing. No stain, no evidence. After she’d searched the entire apartment, finding nothing, she lay back on the bed, holding a piece of perfumed fabric over her nose to overwhelm the fungal smell. Before she fell asleep she heard, far off, the shrill whistle of the train. The window pane rattled from the echo. 

______

As the girls sat at the dining room table with straight backs, piece by piece inserting crackers and animal-shaped cookies in their tiny mouths, cracking them into halves and quarters, Prudence hunched over the kitchen sink, shoving in slices of prosciutto and provolone, reaching again and again into the refrigerator for more. She barely chewed so that they wouldn’t hear her choking down the bits of meat and cheese. The girls never made a sound when they ate. Akari held a hand over her mouth so no one could see the edges of her lips moving around the wad of food she chewed. 

Prudence took enough food to satisfy her hunger, but not so much that their mother would notice the indulgence. 

“We can hear you from here,” Akari said, “it’s disgusting.”  

______

Chiaki wasn’t as skilled as her sister at drawing, but she delighted in coloring insects with jeweled heads, nodding antennae, triangular mouths. Her fascination with the creatures extended beyond the pages of her coloring book. Collections of moths and butterflies rested on top of her dresser, pinned to a corkboard in descending order—largest to smallest. She was always emptying her dress pockets to reveal suffocated caterpillars, squashed ladybugs, spiders with their legs missing. 

Their mother filled the home with art supplies. The girls drew on the white walls of the living room, on the dining room table, with paints and colored pencils and stencil hoops. 

They drew a sleeping man with slanted eyebrows and an angry red mouth. 

______

Prudence wandered long dirt roads in her dreams. She feared falling into the muddy ditch water in the road’s trenches, alongside. After she completed the day’s work with the girls, she got into her station wagon and drove out of town for hours, towards the mountains in the distance, searching for the exact dirt road she’d walked down in those dreams. These drives weren’t practical. Gas was expensive. But she went anyway because it calmed her. She found plenty of winding facsimiles with just as many stones, with a stretching quality, but never quite the same as the road she’d dreamt of. Each journey ended in a dead end, in a farmhouse with sooty windows. 

The station wagon was on its last leg. The motor groaned when she turned the wheel and the wheel itself felt stuck, stubborn. The oil was probably low, but Prudence was too afraid to pop open the hood and inspect the dipstick. She knew how to check. Her father had taught her to maintenance the car, to unscrew the old oil cylinder and be careful not to leave the lip of the new can or else the new can wouldn’t be flush and all the old oil would leak out and the motor would blow up. The oil lubricated all the moving parts of the vehicle. She knew the potential perils of not attending to its needs, but she felt paralyzed, her limbs stuck in place like the gears of the wheel shaft. 

Her mother did not like her learning about cars. She worried people might think her too mannish, not feminine. Perhaps interested in women. 

In the few hours remaining before sunset, she parked on the road’s shoulder and listened to the same song over and over, the cassette crackling in the tape deck, seat tilted back. She listened to the song until she felt brave enough to drive home. 

______

Most days passed without incident. Prudence would play the piano for the girls, the one in the living room, while they lapped at their pastel mochi balls, seated at the kitchen table. Akari would tell Prudence if the song didn’t suit them and ask instead for her to play Swan Lake or Dolly’s Dreaming and Awakening. Those were her favorites. 

______

One day, Akari got off the school bus and ran away from her. She went far ahead, running up the stoop, slamming the door behind her. When Prudence found Akari in her bedroom, she was laying facedown on the bedspread, humping her white stuffed rabbit. 

Prudence did as their mother had asked. She didn’t interfere. She watched Akari from the doorway, checking every ten minutes. Eventually Akari fell asleep and lay still, on top of her toy rabbit. She remained sleeping until their mother came home from the bridal shop. 

Akari worked at her mini sewing machine the next day. The sewing room was situated just off the living room. It contained a twin bed stripped of its sheets and comforter. Prudence wondered who’d slept in this room. Perhaps the girls’ father. The room also contained layers of drawers, dressers full of dress patterns, bolts of fabric, and tiny compartments with buttons of every color, zippers in varying sizes, thimbles, rolls of lace, tape measures, pincushions stabbed full of pearl-tipped pins. 

Akari was constructing a doll’s mini wardrobe--a red-checked gingham dress, a pair of denim trousers with flared bottoms, a white button-up blouse, a sundress of yellow print, an astronaut’s suit complete with cloth helmet and astro-silver trim. 

“How are you feeling today, my dear?” Prudence adjusted Akari’s hair, sweeping her bangs backward. 

They hadn’t mentioned the white rabbit or the napping from the day before. 

Akari lifted her foot from the pedal and turned on her tiny stool. Chiaki stopped humming in the next room. 

“Don’t ever wake me when I’m sleeping.” 

______

Then the next day, Akari and Chiaki played outside. They sprayed water down ant hills and blasted apart spider webs with the hose nozzle set to center, with directed force. The sun had appeared, a rare occurrence in that part of the country, in that time of year. Akari didn’t like how the brightness got in her eyes. Prudence walked behind her with a pink parasol, one she’d found in the hallway closet. Their mother had commented on keeping the girls out of the sun so they wouldn’t get too dark. Chiaki was too zippy to keep up with. But Akari enjoyed the added care, the personal attendance she received. 

There were no doors in the house. Prudence had noticed while she was searching for the parasol. They’d been removed and stacked in the garage. Each hinge was empty. The bolts were missing. 

When their mother returned from work that day, Prudence asked her about the missing doors. 

“My husband did not like secrets.” She paused to wring water from a dish towel. “He removed them.” 

The girls’ mother hung the towel over the sink and went into the next room to fill out the check for the first week’s work. She handed over the check after signing her name at the bottom. Prudence folded it in half and went out the front door. 

As she walked to her station wagon, Akari and Chiaki sprayed the hose in an arc. They held onto it together, straddling it between their legs and laughing. Sunlight got refracted by the water and created a rainbow at the edges of her vision. Blasting her in the face, the water soaked her, drenching through her socks and sweater. She’d kept the sweater on because despite the sunshine that day, she was still cold. She always felt cold. 

Their mother did not see this cruelty. As she removed her sweater and socks, dropping them near the gas pedal, turning up the radiator full blast, Prudence could hear the girls laughing and laughing. 

She drove out of town as the sun started to dip lower. The check fluttered on the seat next to her. Worried it would fly out the open window she pressed it down into her purse, taking care to ensure it didn’t wrinkle. Buds had started to curl around her, from the branches of trees and tapping at her window back home each morning when it was still windy, before the sun came up. Spring would arrive soon, unthawing all the partially frozen things. 

Pressing down on the accelerator, she flew around bumpy turns, flinging pebbles and mud, careless to how the car moaned beneath her in protest. Prudence located the dirt road that usually helped the thumping inside of her. She pulled the car over. Shadows were spreading from behind the far-off mountains, reaching out toward her. 

“What was he doing to the girls? What horrible things?” she cried to the darkness. The road lay before her, long and silent as it always was. 

______

The next day, Akari and Chiaki came down off the bus and walked silently to the house. They dragged their backpacks behind them through the mud. As was wont to happen in that part of the world, the sun’s return, the day before, had been fleeting. The clouds had returned and obscured any light from the sky.  

Prudence followed behind the girls at a distance. No one spoke a word. Prudence desperately wanted them to be happy. She hummed Dolly’s Dreaming but Akari turned around and held a finger to her lips, so she stopped the tune in its tracks. 

Once they reached the house, the girls filed in, dropping their shoes and things in front of the door as usual. Prudence bustled behind them, collecting and hanging and arranging. 

Akari called to her from the sewing room: “Prudence, would you come here?” 

Eager to please, hoping to regale the child with her attentiveness, she practically ran to the back of the house. Chiaki sat at the kitchen table, barely making a sound as she dipped her finger into a container of marshmallow fluff, then placed a finger wrapped in sweetness in her mouth. 

Sitting straight at her machine, Akari waited. 

She turned and handed Prudence her finished product, a beautiful cloth doll without eyes but with a mouth stitched shut in black thread, wearing a wool skirt and white blouse and tiny grey socks. 

______

HOLLY TAYLOR CURRENTLY RESIDES IN A TOWN CALLED COLDWATER WHERE, IRONICALLY ENOUGH, SHE IS SCALDED EACH MORNING BY A PIPING HOT SHOWER. SHE TEACHES ENGLISH AND HUMANITIES COURSES FOR A LOCAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE. MANY OF HER STUDENTS ARE INCARCERATED. HOLLY'S WORKING HARD AND SOMETIMES NOT WORKING HARD ON A NOVEL. SHE COMPLETED HALF OF HER NOVEL WHILE COMPLETING HER MFA AT OREGON STATE, ALL WHILE LOSING HALF OF HER SANITY. WHEN NOT GRADING ESSAYS, YOU CAN FIND HER WALKING HER DOG, GIGI, AND DREAMING OF A DAY WHEN SHE WON'T HAVE TO SECOND GUESS EVERY SOCIAL INTERACTION, EVERY SNEEZE. SHE INTENDS TO MARRY HER FIANCE IN COLOMBIA, ON A BEACH, SOMEDAY SOON.