Indie Ink Writing Challenge - Dream

This is my piece for this week's Indie Ink writing challenge. The way it works is that you sign up for the challenge weekly, and you'll be paired with another participant who will create a writing prompt for you, and you have a few days to write and submit your piece. (Click HERE if you'd like to participate next week.


This week, I challenged Rishaaa with the prompt, "There wasn't any blood."

I was challenged by The Drama Mama. Her prompt was:

This is your dream.


Here's my response.



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This is your dream. There are so many of you. You are fanned out over the universe.

Upon impact, you become your grandmother. You see yourself, as she was, as a child. It is night and you're hiding in the stalks of corn, covering your ears and counting. The world is a shell and the sound of the sea is the air in the your lungs. You're cold suddenly, kneeling in the fertile earth. It will always be night. The stalks bend and sway. You're only a child and there is something in the corn.

There is something in the corn! You push at the thick green darkness, leaves cutting your hands. Tiny bleeding welts appear on your palms. You travel forever, and when you finally emerge, light explodes all around you, and you're just a thin, bending stem yourself. Your roots are warm and the soil is rich and bleeding water.

"Wake up," someone says. "Come on and wake up." You're tied to a bed and everything is moving.

"I'm thirsty," you say.

"Come on," the voice, again.

"I'm thirsty," you try.

"She's not going to wake up," another voice, a woman's voice says.

"I am!" you say. "I only wanted something to drink." There was blood before, but then you turned into a stone.

You become your grandmother again, only that isn't right. You are you, only you've lived for ninety years and there are little children running in the grass. The sunlight through their yellow hair and all over their golden skin is coming from the heart of you. You're warm and far away and you have known your life. You have children, but they are grown.

"Twenty-two year old female," a voice interrupts.

"Jesus," the woman says. "She looks like my daughter."

"My daughter will be giant," you say. "She will be big enough to block out the sun. She will change everything."

"She isn't going to wake up," someone says again.

They are speaking in tones like light. Their words fall like feathers and nestle softly over your body, hard as stone.

"I will have girls," you say to nobody.

Your girls are pebbles and you carry them in a pocket on the front of your apron. The weight of them there is comforting. Four of them, they keep you tethered to the ground. Your feet are always floating away.

"Shh, darlings," you tell them, building them a house of twigs and mud, decorating their tiny door with a sprig of lavender. You hold them, flat and cool and reassuring, in your fingers. Turning them over, their painted-on dresses are cracking. Their eyes were long worn away by your constant touching. "Here you are, my loves," you say and place your girls on the mud floor of their new home.

"You can sleep now."