SHATTERED-LIGHT

EP5: THE DREAM RETURNED

The next dream arrived six nights after the Bleed, although I didn't start calling it the first until much later. At the time it seemed no stranger than the hundreds of dreams people forget before they've finished brushing their teeth. It lingered a little longer than most, long enough to follow me into the morning, long enough that I caught myself thinking about it over breakfast.

Dreams have a habit of stealing from reality without asking permission. They borrow places you've seen only once, faces you've almost forgotten and conversations that never actually happened, then leave you sorting through the pieces after you wake. I'd always assumed that was normal.

It never tried to tell me a story. It offered fragments instead, as though I'd walked into the middle of someone else's morning and the dream saw no reason to explain what had happened before I arrived.

There was a man standing with his back to me.

Black suit.

Broad shoulders.

His posture carried the sort of quiet certainty people spend years trying to imitate without ever quite succeeding. The right side of his face disappeared beneath an eye patch, and every time I thought he might turn enough for me to see the rest of him, the dream slipped somewhere else. Not abruptly. More like a page turning before I'd finished reading it.

Then there was a garden.

Calling it a garden feels inadequate now, but I didn't have another word for it then. I remember rows of plants disappearing into the morning mist, leaves still heavy with dew, narrow paths cutting between them, and the smell of damp earth rising with the first light. None of the plants stayed in focus long enough for me to recognise them. Every time I looked closely, my attention drifted somewhere else, as though the dream considered identification less important than presence.

The little girl moved through the rows as though she'd done it every morning of her life. She couldn't have been much older than twelve, although dreams have never shown much respect for age. Every few steps she stopped beside a plant, pinched a leaf between her fingers, rubbed it gently and lifted it to her nose. Sometimes she smiled before moving on. Sometimes she returned it exactly where she'd found it. I remember thinking she wasn't wandering. She was looking for something. I just didn't know what.

That was all the dream gave me.

No conversation.

No explanation.

No ending.

I woke before sunrise with the strange feeling that I'd left somewhere rather than imagined it. It wasn't frightening. If anything, it was mildly irritating, the way unfinished thoughts usually are. I could remember enough to know there had been a face worth remembering, but not enough to draw it completely in my mind.

The clock beside my bed read 5:18.

I reached for the notebook the board insisted I keep for episodes,

Dream 01

Male.

Black suit.

Eye patch.

Face incomplete.

Young girl.

Unknown garden.

Girl repeatedly smells leaves.

No dialogue.

No identifiable location.

No conclusion.

I looked at the list for a while, hoping another detail would return now that I'd made room for it. Nothing came. The page remained exactly as incomplete as the dream itself.

So I opened the sketchbook instead.

There are things memory forgets, and there are things it refuses to negotiate. My memory has always belonged more to the second category. If I could get the outline onto paper before the day crowded it out with lectures, conversations and ordinary life, there was a good chance I'd preserve whatever certainty remained.

The pencil found the page almost on its own. I drew the line of his jaw first, then the collar of the jacket, the eye patch and the shape of one ear before stopping where the rest of his face should have been. My hand didn't hesitate because I lacked confidence. It stopped because the dream had stopped. I couldn't invent what it hadn't shown me, and somehow inventing it felt dishonest.

I dated the sketch, closed both books and went on with my day convinced the whole thing would disappear into the same forgotten corner of my mind where every other dream eventually ended.

The second dream arrived a week after before that certainty had the chance to become a habit.

It didn't return the next morning, but it refused to leave with the night.

I carried it downstairs the way people carry a tune they can't quite stop humming. It stayed somewhere beneath conscious thought, surfacing whenever my attention wandered long enough for it to find me again. The garden. The girl. The man whose face remained unfinished. They followed me through breakfast with the quiet persistence of questions that weren't interested in being answered quickly.

Laura found me before I found the coffee.

Her fingers brushed the back of my hand instead of my forehead, checking temperature by habit rather than necessity. She'd spent enough years around patients to trust skin before thermometers, though she always confirmed one with the other. A few seconds later she was scrolling through the overnight readings on the tablet mounted beside the kitchen wall, studying graphs that looked perfectly ordinary to me.

"How does the arm feel?"

"Heavy."

"The wrist?"

"Better."

"The pressure?"

"Gone."

She looked up.

"For now?"

I nodded.

"For now."

That seemed to satisfy her, or perhaps it satisfied the part of her that understood improvement and recovery were rarely the same thing. She locked the screen and rested both hands on the counter.

"I'll keep you home another day."

"I thought you were working."

"I postponed."

"There are patients."

"There are colleagues."

She smiled, almost apologetically.

"I only have one daughter."

There wasn't much room to argue with that. Laura never raised her voice when she believed she was right. She simply removed every reason you might have had to disagree until the conversation collapsed under its own weight.

While she prepared breakfast, I returned to the sketchbook waiting beside the window.

Dreams deteriorate more politely than people think. They don't disappear all at once. They surrender details one at a time until certainty becomes approximation, and approximation eventually introduces itself as memory. If I wanted the man's face, whatever the dream intended me to see of it, I needed to work before the day convinced my mind to replace what it couldn't remember with what it thought should have been there.

The first lines arrived easily.

The curve of the jaw.

The collar.

The patch.

After that, my hand slowed. Not because I didn't know where to go next, but because I had reached the edge of what the dream had allowed. Beyond it lay invention, and invention had no business pretending to be memory.

Laura wandered back into the room carrying two mugs.

She didn't interrupt.

She stood beside me for a while, following the movement of the pencil without asking who I was drawing. That restraint was one of the quieter gifts she'd given me growing up. Curiosity didn't always deserve interruption.

"I've been thinking about something," she said eventually.

"Hm?"

"The Henderson case."

I looked up.

"What about it?"

She leaned against the frame of the window, cradling her coffee with both hands.

"A seventeen-year-old refused a treatment that would almost certainly save his life. His parents consented. The doctors proceeded anyway. Three weeks later he recovered."

She waited long enough for me to understand there was another sentence coming.

"He filed a complaint."

The pencil stopped moving.

"And?"

"What do you think?"

I looked back at the sketch.

"I think everyone was right."

She laughed softly.

"That's a difficult answer to defend."

"Not really."

The words came more slowly than they usually did, partly because I was drawing while speaking and partly because I was trying to understand the thought before giving it away.

"The doctors believed they were protecting his life. His parents believed they were protecting their son. He believed he was protecting the right to decide what happened to his own body."

Laura watched me over the rim of her mug.

"They weren't having one disagreement," I continued. "They were having three different ones and mistaking them for the same conversation."

She didn't answer.

That usually meant she wanted me to keep going.

"People don't always resist decisions. Sometimes they resist what they think the decision will cost them. If the doctors had understood what he believed he was losing, they might have discovered another way to save him."

Silence settled between us, though it didn't feel empty.

Laura had always listened that way. Not searching for flaws. Searching for the point where another person's thinking became visible.

When she finally looked down at the sketch, her expression changed almost imperceptibly.

"You've finished him."

I hadn't realised it until she said it.

Somewhere during the conversation my pencil had crossed the invisible boundary between memory and certainty. The missing eye. The bridge of the nose. The mouth. Every line sat exactly where it belonged, arriving without hesitation and without correction.

For the first time since the dreams began, the man had a face.

I studied him for several seconds, waiting for something to feel wrong.

Nothing did.

That certainty should have comforted me.

Instead it unsettled me.

After Laura left for the hospital, the room became very quiet. The city beyond the glass carried on with the ordinary confidence of people who had somewhere to be, while I sat staring at a man who had never existed anywhere outside my sleep.

Or so I still believed.

My phone lay beside the sketchbook.

Jeremy's conversation waited exactly where we'd left it months earlier.

Words are patient. They don't follow you around demanding attention. They simply remain where you abandoned them until you're ready to become the person who can read them differently.

I started from the beginning.

The first time I'd read those messages, every sentence belonged to me. My curiosity. My intentions. My explanations. I'd never once stopped to consider what the conversation might have looked like from the other side.

This time I tried.

A young man living quietly across the street.

A stranger appears.

She knows things he never told her.

She notices routines he never shared.

She asks questions that only make sense if she'd been watching.

I stopped reading.

Nothing Jeremy had said felt unreasonable anymore.

If anything, he'd been remarkably restrained.

I don't know why that embarrassed me more than anger would have.

Empathy has an unpleasant habit of arriving after the damage has already been done.

It asks you to leave your own version of events and spend a few minutes living inside somebody else's, even when you'd rather stay where your intentions still mattered.

Mine suddenly didn't.

I opened the keyboard.

The apology came more easily than I expected.

Hello, Jeremy.

You were right.

I crossed boundaries that weren't mine to cross, and I made you feel unsafe.

I'm sorry.

There wasn't anything else worth adding.

The message left my phone before I could begin protecting myself with explanations.

Five minutes later it vibrated.

I'll call that bygones.

But you're a wizard.

You genuinely scared me.

I smiled despite myself.

Not because he'd forgiven me.

Because he'd chosen honesty over punishment.

That seemed harder.