Iris was right; Adam wasn’t sleeping, not since he’d left the hospital, and he was exhausted. He stared out the window at the world blurring by. This was the route the car had followed in his dream (and in my life). Adam tried to ignore a persistent overlay of the landscape at night by concentrating on the fuzzy brightness of the late afternoon sky (although it hurt his eyes) and on the details it illuminated, details that were absent in the darkness of his dreams. The deciduous trees were now nearly naked. The rest of the leaves had fallen over the past weeks, except for a few brown stragglers (the multi-fingered oak leaves seemed particularly tenacious) that would hang on until their replacements pushed them out in the spring.
A bleached field fell away on the left, and soon the road wa
