The Imagination of Dreams
written by: Pablo Cúzco
Marco woke up with the sun in his face. He got up and walked to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, made breakfast, and ate eggs that tasted like onions. The coffee was hot. He sipped it as he stared out the window. One by one, he sorted through the images left over from his sleep. He separated them from the events of the day before. Slowly, in stages, events started to make some sense:
He dreamed he stood on a mountain and kissed an angel. Her lips felt like feathers. Her arms encircled him and he became angry. He wasn’t sure why. His heart raced. The clouds moved slowly. The world spun like a wheel. He became delirious, stumbled and fell. His father, who died when he was only fifteen, caught him before he could hit the ground. His arms were strong. Marco was weak. He taught Marco how to fly.
***
“Why didn’t I die, instead of Rosín?” He asked his mother about his little sister. Her answer was upsetting.
“I loved you like a son,” she said, as she leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “but you were never a son to me. You’re the one who should have died.”
He drove into a blind curve and let go of the wheel. His feet scraped against steel and glass as he flew through the windshield.
I’ll show her, he thought.
***
Tormented by dreams, he still slept. I should swallow pills, he thought, but his doctor calls him stupid. “Only the sick take medicine, and you’re not sick.”
“So why do I come to you?”
“Because you’re stupid!” he said.
***
The tangles of Marco’s thoughts became the life he lived in his dreams. But they never seemed to stop. It was not imagination. It was real. Only it never happened.
***
Joaquin, his older brother, had just come back from a tour in Vietnam. He bought cough syrup with codeine. The druggist made him sign for it, so he’d hop from pharmacy to pharmacy until he had enough bottles for both of them. When Marco dreamed on codeine, he was still awake. He found out that he could manipulate his dreams. He would watch them like a movie and inspect the characters as they spoke.
***
The room was dark. Joaquin turned off the lights to help them focus on the music. Jimi Hendrix curled his guitar strings around Marco’s ears, his notes biting at the end of the scale. He smashed his guitar into fragments in the boy’s mind. They broke like glass. The pieces spun deep into the back of his eyelids. Indigo colored lights and crimson shadows flashed inside his skull.
***
He didn’t need to take photographs. He remembered. The images he saved became the stories he told his children. His mind was filled with pictures he’d collected through the years. Some of them were dark and somber. Some of them were vivid, and filled with life, funny. He loved to hear his children laugh. It made him feel like he had been a success. Now they’ve grown, he’s glad when his stories make them stop and think.
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