i dreamed that society as we know it was collapsing. it was announced on co-op radio. "gather your things, gather some food, go to the woods," they said. we were happy we'd just gassed up the car the day before. we were happy that leon wouldn't have to go back to work. the kids were excited about camping. we gathered our tent, our propane stove, our candle lanterns. it took me ages to put all the food together, leon was getting frustrated with how long it was taking me, "hurry up, if we don't hurry, traffic will be awful." i opened the freezer and was very impressed to see it was fully stocked with all kinds of camping-friendly foods. for some reason we didn't think that the collapse of society would last more than a week or two, that we'd be able to come home and start fresh. we called [info]aibrean_owl and told her and her family to meet us in the wilderness. we drove and drove, and got to this place right on the beach. we had to cut through some people's properties and backyards to get to the water. there were big, slipperly logs to cross and the kids kept slipping and tumbling into spikey underbrush. at one point we had to cross a log that housed a nest of giant bees. they were as big as my hand. the kids and i were terrified of them but leon kept shouting from up ahead, "it's okay! don't be scared! they are only bees!"

we finally made it down to this pebbly beach and i could see [info]aibrean_owl and her family were there already. she was in the water, swimming, her daughter was splashing in the shallows, her older son and husband and baby boy were in a dingy paddling around, having a great time. we said hello and tried to set up camp. i started cooking up chickpea burgers. the sky clouded over and then a big boat, like a war canoe, came up onto shore, filled with young partiers. they offered us magic mushrooms in trade for some of our food. leon was into it but i felt that going on a hallucinogenic trip while society was collapsing was a recipe for paranoid disaster. i gave them all a burger so that my husband could get high. after we ate it seemed that a fight broke out amongst the partiers. two women, each with babies in slings, started screaming at each other about where they were going to set up their tent. one of them slapped the other one. i tried to intervene, i was worried about the babies being in the middle of the violence and got my face scratched for my efforts. [info]aibrean_owl and i then got mad ourselves, joined forces, and started throwing all the partiers things back in their canoe, yelling that if they couldn't get along they weren't welcome in our retreat. i was mad that leon was too fucked up to help us bully them off our shore. i kept kicking wet pebbles at him every time i walked by. when the partiers saw we were serious, and were about to push their huge canoe away from shore with all their stuff in it, and none of them on it, they started yelling, "uncle! uncle! okay we give up!" and they climbed in their canoe and paddled away.

i dreamed that my daughter went missing. i dreamed that i had dressed her up in a couple of layers of clothing, all green, and sent her out into the backyard to play with her brother for a few minutes while i finished up the dishes. it was really only a few minutes, something i've done before, because while the backyard area isn't completely fenced in, the kids do a good job out there of policing themselves for short periods, and i was going to join them right after i put the last of the dishes in the cupboards. also, leon was home and was supposed to be keeping an eye on them from the deck, where he was sweeping up the leaves that our dogwood tree rains down upon it every autumn.

only when i finished putting the dishes away, i slipped into my shoes and walked into the backyard to only find liam playing by himself under some cedar trees. "where's laurel?" i asked, casually, thinking she must have slipped into a friends' house. he shrugged. "i dunno," he said. i looked over at her friends place and saw that they were not home, their curtains were closed and it was dark looking inside. i started calling her name, louder and louder, as i walked in concentric circles around the yard. no reply. leon's ears were perked and he soon joined me. we kept liam nearby as we widened our search to the rest of the complex, out beyond the pool (which i very heisitantly looked into to be sure she hadn't somehow scaled the fence and fallen in), and into the parking lots. there was no sign of her. i began yelling in earnest and could feel the blood pounding in my ears. leon and i decided to split up and cover the areas of the complex that were out of earshot of our unit. i walked up through the corridors between townhouses towards the playground on one side, he walked up the other. the whole time i was thinking we'd find her at the playground, that she'd gotten it into her head to go up there alone. but she wasn't there. leon and liam and i met at the slide, and though i wanted to cry, i tried to keep it together. we decided to walk back slightly different ways, calling her name ever louder, until we got home. and if there was still no sign of her, we'd call the police.

which we did. leon then went out to knock on the neighbours' doors to ask if anyone had seen her. i stayed at home with liam, who went downstairs to watch t.v. while we waited for the police to show up. i was panicking deep inside but trying to remain calm on the surface for liam's benefit, who still seemed unworried and even slightly oblivious. she could have walked into anyone's unit, told them that we said it was alright. leon was going to find her just a couple of doors down. he had to.

but that didn't happen. instead as i was standing out on the front stoop, watching leon go from door-to-door, i saw the police cruiser pull into our parking lot. leon stopped his canvassing and walked over to talk to the cops. they said something urgent to him and he looked up at me and said, "they've found her, i'm going with them, i'll call you!" and before i could demand more information he jumped in the car and they sped off. i walked back in the house, choking back tears. if they'd found her, why hadn't they brought her home? something had to be terribly wrong. i tried to busy myself in the kitchen, mindlessly wiping the counters, boiling the kettle for coffee i wouldn't drink, reorganizing the bottles of soaps and detergents near the faucet. liam came upstairs and asked if they'd found laurel and i said yes and that she would be home in a little while, daddy was just going to pick her up.

the phone rang a short time later and it was leon. "she's here, at the hospital," he said, but his voice was funny, like he had something stuffed into his throat. "is she okay? is she okay?" i asked, frantic. "she's here. they found her, lynn. she wandered off into the street and she was hit by a car. she's here and they found her." "but is she okay?!" i screamed into the phone. liam perked his ears up from his seat at the dining room table where i'd fixed him a small sandwich. he walked over and put his hands on my hip. i started crying when leon didn't answer right away because i knew. i knew before he even said the words. "she's not. she's not okay, lynn. she was hit by a car going 60k and she died on the way to the hospital. she's here and i'm going to see her in just a few minutes. they want to clean her up a little before i see her to identify her. but she's here, at least we know she's here." and he dissolved into tears on the phone, and i fell down on my knees in the kitchen and began to wail, the phone clattering across the floor, liam falling down with me, putting his hands on my face and trying to look me in the eyes. i lay there screaming and sobbing for a long time. liam started to cry too, though i still hadn't said the words to him, he knew what my reaction meant, and we laid on the tile together, crying and crying forever.

"maybe it wasn't her," i said, "maybe it wasn't her and it was someone else's baby and when leon sees that he'll call again, liam. he'll call again and say, they were wrong, it's not laurel, go outside, keep looking, call her name some more. and we'll find her. we'll find her again. she can't be gone. she can't be." and liam was nodding and smoothing his palms against my cheeks hoping to stem the flow of tears that were so upsetting for him to see pour out of my eyes. but when the phone rang again, leon didn't say that. he said it was her, that he'd seen her in her little green outfit. and he was sobbing, too. and then i threw up.

the dream then shifted to a day or two later. and my mother was in the house with me, trying to help me get up out of bed, get dressed. she'd arranged a funeral, a real catholic funeral, a mass for our daughter. she wanted me to get dressed to go and i was stubbornly not co-operating, still trying to cling to the idea that it was not my daughter who had died, as if refusing to go to her funeral would make her come to life again. but my mother insisted and pulled a black dress over my head. i yelled at her for setting up a catholic mass, none of us were catholics anymore, none of us, we hadn't been in a church since the last family wedding where no one took communion because it had been decades since anyone in the family had confessed or attended service, my daughter wasn't even christened. and she forced my feet into shoes and said that laurel could be admitted into the church and accepted into heaven if we all went to this mass and said prayers and sang hymns and i wanted that for her, at least, didn't i? and when i screamed at her no! it was all bullshit! she slapped me across the face and and screamed back, "you are coming! she is your daughter! you will do right by her!"

and then the dream jumped again and we were shuffling into the church and i was literally choking on my sobs, my legs and knees and feet completely numb and unyielding to my brain's insistance that we enter. and i could see my daughter's casket, open, at the front of the church, and so many people there were lined up to see her, to gawk at her, and i began shaking and had to press the back of my wrist to my mouth to keep the vomit from coming out. leon was next to me, had his hand on my elbow, guiding me, though to look at his face i knew he was as lost as i was. liam was on my other side, clinging loosely to my dress, looking bewildered. i did not want to look at her in the casket. i did not want to be a spectacle for all the church-goers. but i was slowly guided up to the front, where the people all turned to look at us, and parted like waves, and leon and liam and i walked and walked long up the aisle as they let us pass, and then i was looking down at her small, white face in a small, white, satin-lined coffin, in a small, white, lacey dress. and i bit the inside of my lips so hard i drew blood and wanted to throw myself over her small body. and i didn't even make a move to do it but leon sensed the urge in me and quickly turned me away from her, to force me into a pew at the front, to sit me down. and i let myself be guided because the rushing of blood in my ears and the welling of hot tears in my eyes bewildered me and made everything in the church go swimmy and raw and hot and confusing. and as my bottom hit the hard wood of the pew, suddenly a chorus of singing rose up into the air and i looked up into the balconey that hung over the pulpit, and saw hundreds upon hundreds of small laurels in the same tiny white dress she was wearing in the casket, singing, singing, singing their hearts out, all latin words i could not understand, and they all had tiny, delicate silvery angel wings pinned to the backs of their dresses and my mother was next to me, sobbing, and leon was putting his arm around my shoulders, and squeezing me, squeezing me so hard i thought i would cry out from the pain but at the same time glad for it because it kept me in my body. it kept me from flying up out of my body into that balconey where all the laurel imposters were singing for her soul, and ripping them to pieces with my bare hands, sobbing as i did it, raining blood and a mother's rage and grief down onto the congregation.

ghost story

i dreamed last night that my family and i were staying at a friend's house for a week. i don't know this person in real life. they had an old brownstone somewhere in vancouver proper, and a little boy about the same age as liam (and who looked remarkably like him, too). their house was beautiful and huge, there were two guestrooms, one for leon and i and one for our kids. the first night we were there, leon and i were cuddled up in the huge, fluffy bed, just dozing off, when i heard my daughter scream in a blood-curdling way. leon and i leapt out of bed and ran down the hall to see what was the matter. she was saying that another, older girl had come in their room and tried to "hit" her and liam. liam confirmed this story and said that when laurel screamed, the girl had dropped the "big hammer" she'd been carrying and then both she and the weapon had just vanished. no, she didn't walk out of the room. they had simply disappeared.

the rest of the house had woken up and come to see what the fuss was at this point. we all walked around looking for the mysterious girl with the "big hammer" and couldn't find any trace of her. we tucked the kids back into their beds and the woman of the house took me aside and told me that they had had a daughter some years ago, but that she had died in an "accident". she was 8 when their son had been born, and died at the age of 12. a year after she died, her apparition had been appearing in different rooms all around the house, always angry and threatening, but never doing any harm to anyone except their son, who she tormented endlessly with threats of beating him to death with a huge, leather-covered mallet. i was immediately terrified and went back to the room leon and i were sharing to tell him the news. instead of sharing my fear, in typical leon style, he was fascinated and waited up all night to see if the girl would appear to us, but she didn't.

the next day, i was somehow left alone in the house with this family's young son, while everyone else went out to run errands. he was playing quietly in his upstair bedroom and i was reading on the couch in their livingroom. suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and i got a really creepy feeling in my stomach. i looked over to the stone fireplace they had and something about the large, flat, center stone at the base of the fireplace caught my attention...it wasn't sitting perfectly flat or in line with the other stones. i got up and went over to it slowly, still feeling this eerie sensation of being watched. i kept expecting the apparation of the girl to appear, but she didn't. i tested the stone and found it could be moved quite easily out of place. as i shifted it up and onto the other cemented stones i found it was a kind of dirt-filled cubby hole, and inside were sheets and sheets of yellowed paper and photographs. as i started to pull them out i saw they were very crude children's drawings, but not of pastoral scenes and crooked houses. instead they were very violent and gory pictures of a dark-haired girl being beaten to death by a smaller, sandy-haired little boy, who was holding what looked to be a huge, leather-covered mallet. my heart started racing in my chest as i looked at the rest of the drawings, all depicting the same scene in various stages of violence. first, she was hit across the face and red crayon marks showed blood flying from her mouth. in the next picture, she was on the ground, trying to cover her head, and the boy was standing over her with the mallet raised, a grimace of anger on his small face. in the next, the mallet hit her in the head again, this time against her ear, more blood flying from her nose and mouth. and in the final picture, the little boy stood with the mallet hanging limp from his hand, over the body of the clearly dead girl.

i rolled the drawings up, feeling sick to my stomach, and tried to press them back into the hole. there were black and white photographs mingled into the dirt there, too, and i reluctantly picked them out, one by one, blowing the soil off of them. each of them was a recent portrait of the boy that lived in the house, but he was not smiling in any of them. instead his eyes looked dead and flat and black, his face slack. he was wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and looking hollow-cheeked and staring right into the camera. i flipped through the photos quickly, feeling as though this boy could actually see me through the pictures and wanting very much to not be noticed by him. in the final picture, his face was no longer entirely expressionless. instead, while he was still staring directly into the camera, a small smile played at the corner of his lips. when i peered more closely at the background of the photo, i could see a smeary impression of the dead girl standing just off to the side, also staring into the camera as the photo was snapped.

that did it for me. my heart was racing and i felt like throwing up. i knew that the boy was ill, was very, very ill, and had killed his older sister in a violent and brutal way, and i knew that the parents had tried to hide this from everyone, and suddenly, i also knew that if i took the time and effort to move all of the stones away from the hearth in front of the fireplace, and dig through the soil there, i would find her corpse. suddenly i heard noises from the upstairs and realized the boy was coming down. in a panic, i tried to stuff all the drawings and photos down my shirt because i wanted to show them to leon, and i frantically swept the dirt i'd sprayed all over the hearth back into the hole and replaced the loose stone. i managed to jump up and get back to my seat on the couch before the little boy walked into the livingroom and stared at me. i had a huge lump in my throat and was barely controlling my breathing. i said hello to him and asked him what he was up to, trying to sound nonchalant. he didn't answer, he just looked at me, and then his eyes moved slowly over to the fireplace, and then back to me. i felt a little dirt was still crusted on my fingertips and tried to hide my hands behind my back. he left the room again without saying anything and i sighed and wondered what on earth i would do with this knowledge.

finally leon and the rest of them all came back from their shopping trip, loaded down with groceries and other items. i impatiently waited for my chance to talk with leon, to tell him what i'd discovered, but we didn't get a moment alone all day, until finally, after putting the kids to bed and retiring to our own room, i had his full attention. i pulled all the boy's drawings of his depiction of the murder of his sister and all the creepy black and white photographs out and told leon i was sure the little girl was buried in the fireplace somehow. he was immediately alarmed and intrigued and we tried to decide what to do next. as we were talking, our bedroom door swung open, and there the girl stood, a smeary apparition, not really glowing but standing out from her more solid surroundings in a way that was obviously supernatural. i was so terrified i couldn't even move. leon's jaw dropped open. her hair was long and dark and she was dressed in a peach-coloured nightgown made of what appeared to be very thin cloth. she looked to be about 11 or 12 years old. she was holding a mallet in her right hand but did not raise it. instead she lifted her left hand and pointed down the hallway, in the direction of the room our kids were sleeping in, and then vanished.

i freaked, certain she was going to go to their room and terrify/harm my kids again. i somehow got it into my head that because my son looked so much like her killer she was going to seek revenge on the wrong boy. leon and i sprung out of our bed, leaving all the crude drawings and creepy portraits of the boy behind on the covers, and as we dashed into the hallway we could see the door to our kids' room swinging open onto darkness. i started to call out my kids' names, trying to wake them, to warn them, but just as my voice rang into the hallway my son and daughter both screamed in terror. leon and ran as fast as we could into their room and flicked on the light, to find not the ghost-girl standing over them, but the other little boy, poised over their beds, not speaking, and holding a wooden baseball bat. leon tackled him immediately, sending him sprawling across the wood floor, while i ran to the bed and scooped my two kids up in my arms. the kids were sobbing, liam was saying, "i never liked him, i never liked him, but i didn't do anything to him, why does he want to hurt us?' and laurel was pressing her face into my neck. leon picked up the baseball bat in one hand and the silent boy in the other, and as he turned to march out of the room, the ghost-girl appeared in the mirror above the chest of drawers. she was crying and holding the mallet still. i pointed at the mirror and told leon we had to get out of here, take all the pictures and our suspicions to the police. he agreed, and that was when the door to the room swung shut, and we heard a key turn in the lock. we were trapped. and that was when i forced myself to wake up.