I had a terrible dream in which I was in Toronto
and it was the apocalypse. Earthquakes and fires,
violence and loss, and the police, of course, were everywhere. We lived
on the first floor of an apartment building. The one next
to ours had just gone down like chalk. What do you take with you
for the apocalypse? I took my cell phone and charger,
two books with white covers, a jacket, boots, pads,
and toothpaste. My mother didn’t want to leave.
She held her Bible as if she’d been waiting
for revelation and laughed. I’m sixty-seven. You go
do something else. The ground split like cold skin
and something groaned from hell and I had
to leave. I knew I shouldn’t look back but I did.
I always look back. I met up with some people
from the library, still wearing blue lanyards, blinking like fish.
They asked me what books I took; I showed them mine
because I cannot read in dreams, and they showed me theirs, and together,
we told ourselves we saved centuries. Then I was at the city’s edge,
by the lake, where the land curled like a dead finger toward the water.
I saw C, which I thought was strange,
since she didn’t live in Toronto. C was calm, smiling.
Her feet were bare in the shallow water, and she hugged me
when I ran to her. I screamed my whole life, all my time and
all my grief. I told her about my mom, and the notes
in my Notes app, and how I was so young, still so young, so fucking young.
C listened. I think it’s because she’s an author and she has already
written a post-apocalyptic novel. She has already thought about this.
I cannot hope, but she can. She tells me a story about young children playing
in a neighbourhood that was not always kind to them, but that
there was still love in every shadow, in every hand’s lifeline.
And living and dreaming are the same.
There will always be something waiting to kill us.
Something to wake us up for real.
(Editors’ Note: “In Dreams, I Cannot Read or Hope” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 59A.)
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© 2024 Terese Mason Pierre
