Dreams that burn - A short story

DREAMS THAT BURN

​​I dropped the charges. I let him go. 

The one who violated me.​

And, what’s a broken home worth? A lot when you see your life being squeezed out ​for all its worth. Just that it’s your dreams being squeezed out.

The home. My dad was whoever – I mean, I just don’t know. He was worse than those birds that come visiting every spring. He looked like a vulture too. The behavior was bang-on, he didn’t need help there.

Mother tried, got broken, stayed broken. She blames herself for my birth. By that she means well, “I can’t take care of her​ anymore.”

 

Yeah, you’d want to know about my dream now that I’ve said it a few times. It’s this; how about a normal life - growing up, boys, movies, summer? A family around all this? That's where the dream began and soared. ​It was brutally cut short soon.

What’s with this gravity of "broken" that everything once broken, stays broken? It's a continuous broken chain. Noticed how a broken home’s always on a broken street. Folks are broke, I am broke and my sisters can sense a broken upbringing, but we stick together in this merry-go-around of misery. Two sisters; Kelly and Marianne – she’s five and Kelly’s 12.

I turned seventeen when the violation happened. An initiation into another unabridged story of a broken world.

The street, and our broken home at the end of it. The street always reminded me of a decaying shell of something that once incubated good life within. An English poet from Victorian times might’ve felt at home on this forlorn street, penning about his tormented soul, and the squalid surroundings would’ve egged him to contextualize it.

Not me. Not in this modern living. You had to stand for something even if you start broken.​

This is what happened to me that evening…

I was walking home from extra classes that since I was nurturing this ​great ​dream of graduating early and short-circuiting my way out of this squalor. ​A dream of taking my sisters along is the sequel to the original dream. Part III of the dream run ​was to get my mom out and to see some of that elusive good life in the time she’d have ​left ​when this dream-train got rolling.

Probably, just maybe, I’d get my dad to stop being a vulture. Can you stay with me on this one? A long-haul ​freight ​train, speeding across flat terrain, hitching a new wagon at every other station, me at the front – the fire engine, my sisters right behind and mother right there​ with them in the coupe​. What a dream​run that'd be​. They had taught me about the power of visualization at school and I jumped right on.

 

The visualization had some heavy backing. I picked up literature early in life and boy I could write!

Few of the school teachers started seeing my potential. Just that I stayed out of school too many times. To help around at home. There were two sisters who needn’t have to go through what I lived with growing up. I pitched in as much as I could at home. I worked part-time – odd jobs. Kept out of trouble – there was plenty of drugs around. You could snatch it right off the air. I used to read to keep out of trouble.

​Instead, I devoured poetry and prose, memoirs and classics. 

​The edgy and the blunt, the sharp and the dull – there was something immersive and I drowned in it all, gulped great big chunks off pages. Words and their rhythms​. I made something of that my own. Mailed in anonymous poems to magazines and saved the extra cash from anything I won from the writing.

A gorgeous sun was setting that evening – like God was spreading some golden-brown syrup over pancakes. I was a block away from shell-street. I thought I’d take inspiration from that imaginary English poet who might have chiseled at his craft ​on ​shell-street in another age. I veered and walked across a kerb and into a​n abandoned ​house.

Everything was standing up ​in the house; the walls, the roof - just that it had its windows broken​, ​door kicked in​ and the lawns had gone south, remained there and then turned wild​. There was a nook in ​the house where I would sit and write poetry. I settled on the floor, pulled a notepad and was weaving through ​verses.

The light was fading and I was lost in the reverie of an imagined world of words.

I hadn’t noticed when a light shadow walked across. I had looked up only when he was standing right over me. I was there for a reason. He had one too. This is when the dream starts developing the first cracks.

He pulled his pants down and I had looked on. It’s called numbness. I had seen my father foisting himself on my mother. That's my mind; with memories that surface up like a submarine out for another fresh breath. Nothing exists in isolation, there’s a lot of associations, memory isn't stand-alone – there’s a lot I picked up from studies and here it comes. 

Flight or fight. Where do you get wings for such a flight, what do you fight with? I was composing poetry, my head in clouds and then this.

He pinned me down. He didn’t notice or didn’t care that I had started crying. I wouldn’t have known when he was done or who he was. Wouldn’t have known when he was done cos’ I had numbed myself. Same as when I saw the vulture pecking at my mother at home. You know how they keep picking on the flesh? It’s the same.  

I wouldn’t have known who he was – it was dark by then – but then his cellphone rang and he answered. Light from the screen had illuminated his scar. Must’ve been an important call, cos’ he left immediately after that. I found out later, he was a ​user. The curse of a broken street. 

​I sobbed, howled, emptied out and not a sound escaped. This was my shell-street; I was incubated and felt safe here. How do you make sense of what happened? My sisters were few blocks away. I had to protect them from this, this utter disregard, this world that can turn on its cruelties in a spur.

 

I ​tried ​pull​ling​ my dress down far below my knees​ when I finally stood up - I don't recall how long I had laid on the broken floor​.

I kept seeing a train​, hurtling with vigour, picking up wagons. I looked around - my book of poems had slipped a little away. And, I walked to the cop house.

He was identified within hours. I went to the identification parade and picked him out. They called me for a preliminary hearing.

And the next day I dropped the charges.

Why? My dream​ train​, I don’t know what would happen to it.

​The man who violated me, what would happen to him? He ​was younger than me, he ​would go into a prison where he would be ​raped (there, I said it for the first time). I decided to spare him that. There's more to this, something redemptive​ I did; ​I wrote him exactly what I felt, with words that I had excelled at – brutal and honest. He wrote to me this one time (doesn’t matter what he wrote) and then he disappeared.

- end -