Dream 1

The Yellow House

In my childhood I often played here. It was a two-story farmhouse with yellow clapboard and a wide wrap-around porch. The interior of the house was warm, sun filtered in through gauzy curtains with the breeze. The wooden floors made a pleasing sound as bare feet ran over them. This was a happy place.
Up the stairs was a large bedroom. It had huge windows on either side of a dark stained four-poster bed. There were pictures on the side tables but I recognized no one in them. The sound of a babbling baby drew me out of the bedroom and up the hallway. In a small room on the left was a wooden crib. I wasn't tall enough to see into the bed but, I could see the baby kicking his legs as he cooed. The plaster walls in the room were painted white, and the sunshine rendered the room an ethereal glow.

I am older now. I return to this place of happiness to find it abandoned. The grass grows over the porch and the yellow paint peels away from the warped siding. There is no sun today. I enter the house to find it abandoned. It is dark and cold. The floor creaks beaneath every step. The curtains hang limply in front of the windows. I reach to pull them back, hoping for more light and they disintigrate in my hands. Dust has settled on every surface. I climb the stairs and find the bedroom empty. Where the bed sat is a vacant gap between two cracked windows barely obscured by shredded curtains.
I walk up the hallway, dread creeping up my throat. In the small room on the left paint hangs in patches on the cracked plaster. A capped steel pipe projects from the wall at an unnatural angle. On one end of the room a familiar shape is shrouded beneath a dust-covered white sheet. I pull it away to reveal the crib, devoid of even a mattress. In my heart I know the baby didn't live.
The difference is vast between light and dark. The difference between dreams and nightmares.