Fiction Friday Two

I was seventeen when I was asked to be a Guardian. It wasn’t so much of an asking as an explanation of what I was and what I could do about it. My dream life had always been unusual but I didn’t know that until fourth grade, when I got into a bit of trouble about an essay I’d handed in.

Remember those back-to-school papers you always had to write? The “what I did this summer” things that – at least where I went to school – were a staple of the first week back to school. Maybe they thought a week was the longest we could remember what our summer had been like. Huh. Like every kid wasn’t spending the first month of school day-dreaming about the summer we’d just had and the remaining months wishing for the next one to arrive.

I wrote my essay based on a trip to an amusement park that I’d taken. The trip itself was very clear in my mind so I thought might as well use it. It was a bit unusual, in that I went to an amusement park that was set up on floating docks off the lakeshore road out past the village. It was night, and I didn’t go with my family, and the fair itself had some unusual things going on. I was too young to wonder how heavy things like a monstrous Ferris wheel managed to float on a series of attached floats, or why there were circus animals free to wander around. I just knew it was very exciting and I’d had an excellent time.



Turns out that I hadn’t done any such thing. I got a B on the paper, with the comment that we were supposed to write a report on something we’d actually done, not on something we wish we’d done. I was quite hurt; I was certain it had truly happened. So certain, in fact, that I took the wrong bus after school to check it out. Surely there would still be a fair, or at least the giant floating docks that had supported it all.

The bus left the school, with me so anxious I didn’t even think about how I’d get home once I got off at the end of the route, but I got on none-the-less. We reached the bottom of the hill, where the ferry to cross the river is. As the bus waiting at the stop sign I watched the line of cars waiting to get on the little barge, and admired precise piloting of the tug boat that pulls it across the river, quite relieved that it was exactly as it was supposed to be. I wasn’t losing my mind or my memory.

Driving along Lakeshore Drive I watched houses go by, houses that had been there for a hundred years or more: Glen Mary, with its stone walls which I knew hid espaliered pears and apricots, Red Rock House with its red clay tile roof, huge homes with sailboats tied up to family docks, all interspersed with long breaks of stream and forest. I was comforted by the familiar sights (in a small town there isn’t anything that isn’t familiar). My certainty that the fair had been real and my teacher’s insistence that it wasn’t had left me feeling confused and lost.



In time we came to the stop I had planned to get off at. That in itself almost blew everything. It was a farm stop, for just one student a notoriously anti-social girl that never seemed to have any friends, and parents most of us were afraid of. I was an adult before I realized the two things were connected. Point was, the driver asked me where I was going. I mumbled something about homework and went running down the lane to the farmhouse at the end before he really had a chance to question the likelihood of this being true. I waited until the bus was gone before I went back to the road. I got a glare from the girl, but no questions at all. Grieves me now to think I didn’t take the time to get to know her, but that’s a story for another day.

I walked along the road, green rolling farmland and sugar bush to my left, scrub brush and a field of horses to my right bordered at the far end by a line of trees and a fence. As I approached the end of the field I hopped the ditch to say hello to the horses. I think even then I was beginning to know what I would find when I got past the line of trees. Scrambling up the far side of the ditch and going up to the barb wire fence two horses ambled up to meet me. I stroked the soft muzzle of the little pinto who was clearly hoping for a carrot or two. When nothing was forthcoming he gave me a bit of a shove with his head and wandered away. His buddy didn’t even try and the rest stayed where they were, treats clearly not being offered. I figured it was time to move on, when even a horse was willing to give me a move-it-along shove.

So I did. Shuffling along in the dust and gravel I walked the last few yards, waiting for the lake to come into clear view past the line of trees. And the lake did indeed come into view, just…nothing else. It was a lake. A lake that I’d probably been past a million times with my family. No fair, no docks, nothing.

Why hadn’t I thought of that before I’d written my report? I should have known, even then, that fairs don’t appear and disappear overnight. Not to mention I would not have been out in the middle of the night on my own, at a fair on the water with circus animals free to roam amongst the patrons! I had to admit that I had indeed dreamt the whole thing. But it had seemed so real. Even standing there in disappointment I could hear the music from the carousel, see the lights of the Ferris wheel and remember how delicious hot dogs and cotton candy had tasted in the middle of the night; so real, and yet in the end not real at all.

That was the first and last time I talked about what I came to refer to as true dreams. Not because I thought I was the only one that had them (in fact, I assumed everyone dreamt this way until I was much older) but because I continued to have things happen in dreams that seemed real and real life events that seemed very dream-like. I was teased for months about that essay. I had no intention of having anything like that happen again.