Her Eyes Were Already Gone

Last night I dreamed about a forest fire. I was on a class trip when the trees started burning, and suddenly I was one of the helpers, handing water bottles to people running away. Then a man drove up, looked me in the eyes, and set the tree beside me alight. He pulled out a gun, fired, and missed. I knew the only way out was to throw myself down the embankment, so I did—rolled the whole way to the bottom.

At the bottom I found a classmate. I asked if he knew where the terrorist was. "Up there," he said. I looked and watched the man leap from a tree and come toward us. Then another kid from my class drove a harpoon into his back and he went down covered in blood.

We walked toward him. He stood back up—and it wasn’t the terrorist anymore. It was my friend Rebecca, soaked in blood, stumbling. I screamed at her: "Are you still trying to kill me?" She said only "No," but her eyes were empty. No remorse. Nothing. Then she fell.

I grabbed her and yelled for a doctor. A hospital appeared. I ran up flights of stairs and found a doctor and a nurse beside another girl, also covered in blood. I laid Rebecca on a sheet on the floor and screamed for them to help her. The doctor barely glanced at her, pointed at the blonde girl, and said "At least she still has a chance," then turned away. I looked back at Rebecca and I could see in her eyes that she was already dead.

I woke up still screaming inside whatever screaming looks like when it’s silent. Carried that heavy, muffled feeling around all day—the kind of grief that knows it came from a dream but doesn’t care.