Page 7 of Ex Somnis

My dad is gesturing with his coffee cup the way he does when he’s telling a good story. Maybe the one about the time he set the grill on fire, and my mother threw a mixing bowl of water at it, only to hit him instead.

I chuckle at the memory, and the man’s green eyes find mine a half second before the next lyrics leave my mouth.

He lifts his coffee cup toward me in a toast with a smile.

I smile back.

It’s easy.

Tessa hooks her arm around my waist and sings the chorus into my shoulder, off-key in a completely different direction than I am, as my mother pulls a tray from the oven. The kitchen fills with the smell of vanilla, lemon zest, and something underneath both that is less a scent and more a feeling, the feeling of a room where no one has left yet.

The muffins are perfect. Golden-domed and risen evenly with not a single crack. Not even the tiny ones that always happen when you look away for a second. I press my fingertip to one, and it springs back.

I’ve never made a batch without at least one crack.

“Those are gorgeous,” my dad calls from the table.

I dip my finger into Tessa’s frosting bowl, and she swats my hand away. I scrunch my nose at her, and she scrunches hers back.

The yellow walls hold all of us, and no one says goodbye, because no one is going anywhere.

This is the kitchen where everything is still whole.

Where everything stays.

The light is perfect.

Everything is perfect.

Some daydreams you don’t ever want to wake up from.

This is one of those.

CHAPTER THREE

Paul

The mirrors don’t distort.

That’s the thing I keep returning to, even as I move through them, turning left and right, finding the same wall of glass at every angle. Any other nightmare bends the image, gives me spiders with impossibly long legs, hollows out my eyes, or stretches the darkness in the room.

That’s standard dream architecture.

That’s textbook.

These are mirrors.

Just me.

“Paul. Paul, please…”

She’s back to being somewhere I can’t find. Only this time, it’s not her eyes haunting me or her lips. It’s her voice. I press my hand to the glass in front of me, and the glass gives me back my palm, my face, and the gray at my jaw. My reflection looks at me with the expression I apparently wear when I am trying not to panic, the same one I wear for most things. Maybe that’s the problem.

But it’s a fraction too slow.

Or am I?

It’s hard to tell.