Her Peaceless Face

I poured cornflakes into a bowl at some ungodly hour and she was still right there—bone-white face pressed against my chest while I screamed half the city down around us. I looked at my forearms expecting blood and found nothing but kitchen light playing tricks.

In the dream I was outside a club, phone in one hand and a tequila bottle in the other, and people were circling with the news: she’d left with some shady guy from the Melo, they said. Too drunk to know what she was doing. I screamed her name into the noise. I was convinced—the way you can only be convinced inside a dream—that sheer volume would fix it. That the louder I got, the better things would turn out.

Someone showed me the way. I ran, I sobbed, and when I turned the corner and found her lying in some filthy back courtyard, so small and undefended, every feeling I’d ever had collapsed into a single impossible moment—one shot, one crack, one blow. I threw myself down next to her and screamed words that don’t exist in any language and held her until everything around me burst apart. I choked on blood and tears. The last thing that burned into me before I woke was her face—unlucky, peaceless—and her flat eyes holding me responsible for not being there when it happened.

Opening the window helped. Cold December air on a face still wet. The images thinned, the way they do when you force them to share space with something as stupid and solid as a bowl of cornflakes.