This is the Dream, a Novella

By Owen Thomas

Cali Watts is struggling to come of age in a life saturated with indifference. Stealing almost worthless things isn't helping. Neither is dreaming of the dead.

"Take me where you took her," I said. "That's where I want to go."

Her parents named her Calico Watts, a name she hates as m

• Language: English
• Publisher: OTF Literary, LLC
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737737674

Book preview

This is the Dream

A novella

Owen Thomas

The characters and events portrayed in this novella are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2021 OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska

Author Website: http://OwenThomasLiterary.com

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

This novella This is the Dream is included as the title story in the larger work of short fiction This is the Dream, by Owen Thomas, Copyright 2021, OTF Literary.

ISBN:  978-1-7377376-7-4

OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska.

THIS IS THE DREAM

This is the dream. I’m in the science lab. I sit hunched on one of those tall, metal stools in the back of the room. I’m at a long, heavy black table that seems like maybe it was built to hold a full-sized dead person and not a few tiny frogs in their little plastic trays. I’m wearing the Van Halen t-shirt my mother hates, and my denim skirt and my black Converse sneakers.

I don’t know where my purse is. You don’t need purses in dreams. I’m barelegged and am not wearing underwear.

I was usually in my tights when I wore that denim skirt because it rides up when I sit. I had two classes in the science lab – biology and chemistry – and so twice a day I had to sit up on one of those stools. I was wise to some of the guys pretending to drop their pens, trying to get a glance up at my privates.

I call my privates, privates, because that’s what they’re supposed to be: private. I call the guys, guys, because they aren’t women and they aren’t men and they aren’t boys. They’re guys. 

I’ve never been able to stand guys. I never dated. I never really tried. You’re thinking I’m some lesbian or whatever. Or that I’m too ugly to ever have a boyfriend. It just seemed like such a waste of time. Like this painful and humiliating game that nobody really knows how to play but where everyone has to pretend they’re experts. I just kind of stayed out of it. People playing that game only see the other players. Everyone else is invisible. I was one of those.

Anyway, in the dream, I’m barelegged and not wearing underwear. The metal edge of the stool is cold against my skin. My legs are embarrassingly white and covered in gooseflesh. I can see little light-blue veins like the way rivers and streams look on a bleached-out roadmap.

I’m sitting at the table in the back of the room. Just like always. Only it’s not really like always because the room looks and feels totally different in the dream. Someone has removed the middle partition wall, so the room is twice as wide as normal, as if God decided to unfold the world and suddenly everything is double, like an inkblot on an unfolded page. Two sinks. Two blackboards. Two sets of equipment cupboards for the Bunsen burners and scalpels and microscopes. Identical periodic charts on each side of the room. Two long tables that could’ve held two dead bodies.

I half-expect identical Mr. McKenzies to walk in the room from opposite doors wearing identical black plastic glasses and putty-colored sweater vests and offering a reminder in stereo about something having to do with isotopes.

I say I half-expect it. I don’t really expect to see Mr. McKenzie at all. Everyone around me is either from American Government or English Lit and I don’t see anyone who actually belongs in a science lab. Everyone has their head bent down, taking a standardized test, like the SATs or whatever, filling in the little bubbles with pencils. The test form in front of me is mostly blank. My pencil doesn’t work. It’s not broken; it just won’t make any marks on the page. Like the lead tip is fake.

So, I raise my hand to complain. That’s when I feel a hand on my arm.

I put my arm down and look up to see Mr. McKenzie, just one of him, looking back down at me with disappointment all over his face. I don’t really register his expression at first. I’m hostage to my view from beneath his chin, like I’m being forced to climb Mount Rushmore or whatever. His nose seems kind of loose and baggy and asymmetrical. His nostrils are like the undersides of two exotic mushrooms. And it’s not just the nose. It’s like the skin of his entire face needs to be power-washed and re-stretched over the frame.

Eventually, I do make the climb up to Mr. McKenzie’s hazel eyes and I can appreciate the entirety of his disappointed expression. Even though he never breaks eye contact, I can sense the restraint he is bringing to the goal of not looking at my mostly naked lap on the high metal stool. I try to tell him that my pencil does not work. All he does is shake his head and point to the front of the room.

I don’t walk to the front of the room in the dream. Walking is unnecessary in dreams, like purses. I’m just suddenly up there with my empty test form and worthless pencil in my hand, standing at a long row of tables that have been connected end-to-end so that they block the exit. I’m pulling at my skirt because it keeps riding up and I look around self-consciously. None of the other students are paying attention. They’re all completely absorbed in finishing the test I have yet to start.

Over at the far end of the tables, my mother is building an elaborate five-story structure out of popsicle sticks or tongue depressors.

Mom? I ask, and she speaks to me without looking up from her tongue depressor hotel, saying something like If you don’t complete the next level, Cali, then you’re nobody. You don’t get a car and you forfeit everything you’ve worked for.

Leave her alone, says my father.

I turn my head. He’s sitting at the other end of the row of tables, silently weeping and beating russet potatoes with a silver meat tenderizer. The hammer hits the potatoes, exploding them across the table but without making any sound. "You’re wasting your time, kiddo," he sniffs. There is no future. Go get high. Go get laid.

"Bill, that is the most irresponsible thing…," says Mom.

I’m pretty sure I never asked for your opinion, Karen.

I’m looking from my mother to my father and back again, failing to see the person standing across the table in front of me until she says my name.

Cali.

My head stops ping-ponging, suddenly in the grip of the ridiculously blue eyes of Taylor Boss. Taylor shares my species, my age and my gender. Those are the only things we have in common. I’m actually fudging on the species, which is technically the same but not really, in the way that a Great Dane and a Chinese Crested are technically both canines but come on.

I once overheard two teachers telling a joke about Taylor Boss. The joke had Taylor’s mother in the stirrups giving birth and her father asking the doctor whether she was crowning. The doctor looks up at Taylor’s father and says, yep, it’s a tiara. At the time I heard that joke, I didn’t really know what crowning was and I thought a tiara was a kind of Italian pastry. To know Taylor Boss is to get the joke anyway.

So, in the dream, all I can do is stare at Taylor like I’m a farm animal. She repeats my name, this time in its full ridiculous pretension, expecting the sound of it to break the spell. It does.

"Calico Watts."

Her eyes are so clear, like looking over an ocean on a brilliant sunny morning. Her hair is glowing gold. I feel too tall and skinny and drab. My eyes too brown. My hair too flat and shapeless. I ache for makeup and lots of it. I hate makeup.

Yes? I ask in a whisper. My father begins throwing russet bombs at the popsicle Marriott. My mother shrieks, batting them away and threatening the divorce she’s already had for five years. Taylor reaches out and takes the test form out of my hand.

You can’t be here, she says.

I can’t?

No.

Why not?

Because you’re dead.

I’m not dead, I protest. I’m right here. I’m literally standing right…

Taylor lowers the test and tries to lay it flat on the table, but she can’t because the gun is in the way. I don’t even know it’s there, an old-timey, western six-shooter thing, until she picks it up and hands it to me.

I stick it in the waistband of my skirt like it’s no big deal, like, of course she’s handing me a gun; what else is she supposed to do when she confiscates a test? But the gun is heavy and now my skirt not only rides up from the bottom but also sags down from the waist and I feel like I’m this close to not wearing anything at all.

Taylor places the test flat on the table and extends her hand toward me again. Her hands and nails belong in a manicurist advertisement. Her ring finger sports a pink diamond. She reaches for me. I see it coming and do nothing to stop her.

She cups my right breast. Then, with a firm squeeze, she opens it away from my chest like she might open a medicine cabinet or a mini fridge. All I can do is stare in shock. I’d never known they were on hinges.

She reaches inside and starts removing things. First a can of shaving cream. Then a pregnancy test stick. She piles thing after thing on the table in front of her. A shot glass. A ceramic Santa. A blooming hibiscus with a long green stem. A snow globe with a little wooden schoolhouse or a church or whatever inside. She shakes it and holds it in her hand for a second, peering inside like she’s waiting to see if someone will open the little door and step outside into the snow.

The Slinky is the last thing I remember before I wake up. You know what I mean by a Slinky, one of those vintage aluminum coils that stretches from three inches to about four or five feet. The Slinky is a useless thing. It has no purpose. Sure, you can put it on the top step and get it going and watch it go all the way to the bottom. But I can do that with a rock or an old tire.

Anyway, Taylor reaches inside my chest and pulls out one end of a Slinky. And she keeps pulling and pulling, hand over perfect hand, as if removing a ropy internal organ, until there is easily twelve feet of silver coil on the table. It doesn’t stack neatly, either. It forms an unruly pile over the other things. The Slinky shivers and rolls in the fluorescent