Mary McLaughlin Slechta
Where Dreams Go
Pettyman’s new house had a detached garage. Winter is the only season in that part of the country, so he looked forward to parking his car inside. Except there was a dream in there. A big one. Nestled as comfortable as swallows under the eaves.
“Scat!” he hollered.
The next morning there were two.
“You need to take a broom to them,” his wife said.
“A bullet,” his brother-in-law suggested.
But Pettyman was a reasonable man and stooped to the dreams’ level. “I got an empty attic. Lot nicer.”
The dreams shook what he took to be heads. The next morning there were thirty, and the next, a lot of squeezing and maneuvering. Impossible to count.
“You’re a fool,” said his wife. The car was half-hidden in the mounting snow..
“Told you so,” said her brother.
“I got a basement,” Pettyman told the dreams. “Dry and cool.”
When morning came around, those dreams were cheek by jowl. The garage door, once opened, could barely close.
“That many dreams can’t bring no good,” his brother-in-law said. “Watch the walls don’t fall.” He drove his sister home to their people.
Pettyman got to thinking. Why had the dreams chosen his garage and what did they intend to do? Were they dangerous?
He slept on those questions, and in the morning, when he went to check, he thought for a moment the dreams had fled. Good news for the car and him too for maybe his wife would change her mind. But the more he investigated, the farther along he went. The walls had indeed fallen, for the space inside was vast. He was sure every car, truck, and motorcyle in the world could fit. If not for the dreams.
He hurried back before he was lost, nailed the door shut, and begged his wife to return. The snow continued to fall, but by meeting each dawn with a shovel and salt, he avoided vexing her.
By the time the house passed to a daughter, the garage slumped dangerously to the left and a black tarp replaced the door. Her daughter and friends waited until no one was home to drag out a rusted grill and lawn chairs. They strung Christmas lights across the tarp and when night came, lit the grill with wood and gasoline. They counted a thousand new universes spit from its cracked bottom.
A Summer Cold
Leavener noticed things. At five, on the hottest day of a hot summer, he noticed the bees. Normally buzzing the flowerbeds, they covered the sidewalk. Not stuck and melting, like worms on a hot day, these were perfect, whole, and motionless against the bleached concrete. He counted twenty.
Inside his grandmother’s house, where he and his mother lived, the closed curtains rippled at a regular pattern. He counted the pattern out in his head. Last summer his mother would have tapped the glass, “Come away from there, Leavener. Come out of the sun.” This year the heat made her sick. She called it a summer cold and stayed on the couch under the oscillating fan.
He traced a finger across the back of a bee and tapped. Before he could get a response, he noticed a man in a black suit and shiny shoes walking toward him down the middle of the street. He thought it was one of his mother’s friends until the man made a quick turn into the house next door, taking the steps two at a time. Leavener noticed the man didn’t ring the bell or use a key and knew he ought to tell his mother. He collected the bees in a plastic bucket and went inside, spreading them in a half circle between her and the fan. Then he lay down too and blocked his ears from her ragged breath.
He woke up when she screamed. She was batting the air with her fists. He opened the front door, and the bees flew out, except the one the fan had blown across the room. He hid it in his hand and watched her smoke a cigarette on the edge of the couch. She rubbed her temples like she was alone in the world, like he wasn’t there, and his eyes teared from the smoke. He waited for her to mash out the cigarette and go back to sleep.
On the front stoop, he talked to the motionless bee, reminding it of the flowers, urging it to fly. He blew hard like he was the fan, and it flew. For a moment. He hurried to pick it up. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over, his nose bubbling. He held the hand with the bee to his ear and heard an ocean of bees inside. Then nothing.
The man in black came out of the house next door with Old Man Sherman. They left the door open, and the old man wasn’t wearing his thick-lensed glasses. The man in black stopped at the stoop, and Leavener, deciding this must be one of his mother’s friends and a piece of gum or dollar for ice cream was forthcoming, ran a sleeve across his nose. Sure enough the man reached a hand into his pocket. But it stayed there. He winked. “How your mama doin?”
Leavener started to speak truthful, but Old Man Sherman poked out a lip and shook his head. “Summer cold,” he replied instead. The man raised an eyebrow. “Tell her I asked for her.” He pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket and lowering it just out of reach, revealed a candy wrapped in silver foil. He pointed his chin at Leavener’s hand.
The man continued along with Old Man Sherman and the bee. Leavner noticed his neighbor wasn’t wearing shoes. Didn’t have feet anymore to put them on. Inside his mouth, the candy melted to a pleasant memory. His mother was calling. He ran to her. Forgot everything he was meant to say.
Mary McLaughlin Slechta
Mary McLaughlin Slechta is the 2021 recipient of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize for Mulberry Street Stories (Four Way Books, 2023). She has recently published fiction in Mom Egg Review and midnight & indigo and has new work forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. A Kimbilio Fellow, she lives in Syracuse, New York with her family.