#SOL16: A Nightmare

A room (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

A nightmare wakes me. It's 5 a.m. Good Friday. In the dream which is receding even as I rush to record it my husband is dead and still there are doctors and nurses who won't let him sleep, or rest, or be gone and there alway seems to be some reason for why they need to unsettle him. This time there is a bomb that may detonate.

We need to move him, a disembodied voice tells me with some urgency.

Move him? No, please it will hurt him. I am frantic as I say this and as I look around I can't find Rob.

There seems to be some concern for me, for Devon who I somehow know is sleeping down the hall, sleeping even though emergency vehicles, police, and doctors and EMTs have arrived at the ranch where we are staying.

The ranch? We don't live on a ranch and yet I sense we are out west.

I try to explain to one doctor that he cannot disturb Rob anymore. "Each time you move him, even slightly, he's in agony. He's dead. He's dead. Just stop."

It's your life we're saving, a voice explains. Your life. If we don't move him, we can't get to the bomb.

And it's the anticipation of the loud noise that doesn't quite happen that wakes me from the nightmare into the still dark night where I write these words.

Even now, mostly awake, I am mouthing, He's dead. Let him be. Let him be in peace.