Back in the old days, vendors sold dreams at the local bazaare. A half dollar bought scented bath water; when a child unscrewed the cap, iridescent bubbles rose to join the clouds and lilac petals scattered across the ice. For a dollar, a girl could own a strip of lace from Queen Victoria's wedding gown; if she closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the strip, she'd hear the trotting horses and smell the smoke from sputtering kerosene lights as though she had tripped into another time. Bronze medallions from Hercules' shield guaranteed strength; boys saved pennies to buy these secretly, then wore them in the trouser pocket closest to their skin. When the Dream Emporium closed, the neighborhood lost hope, a glow in the communal soul. Or so said Grandma.
"The place was a dump, it brought down property values. Everyone was glad to see it go," Mother turned towards Carla. "There were rows and rows of booths selling junk. Paper lanterns painted in florescent colors. Moonscapes painted on black velvet. Four foot high candles carved to look like elves." When crews dismantled the bazaare, with its exterior of sloughing paint and garish booths under a sagging roof, the adults approved. When builders erected a brightly lit mall of clean new brick in its place, everyone applauded; such changes pulled the town out of the outhouse era and into the present.
Grandma shook her head as she hunched over her spaghetti, working to wind the strands around her shaking fork.
"Bulldozed dreams," she muttered. "Carla, don't be like so many people, who are afraid to dream. Sure, when you grow up, you'll have to put away some dreams; that's just part of life. But never throw them away. Don't shred them, don't toss them in the fire. Put them somewhere safe, and choose their hiding place carefully."
Grandma should know, Carla thought. In this house, Grandma was the dream expert, the one who knew how to squeeze through the cracks between this reality and other dimensions and how to treasure keepsakes from those other worlds.
"Senile," Mother smirked. Once a month, mother called nursing homes, hoping to place the demented old windbag where she belonged. The fees were too high; mother and father agreed that Grandma could stay longer, in the drafty guest room easily forgotten at the end of the hall. Carla dreaded dinners without Grandma and her mysteries. With only mother and father at the table, droning about international treaties and interest rates, life would seem dry, flat and drab as cardboard; she hoped that her parents would never find an affordable nursing home.
"When I was young, just before I married Joe, I knew I had to set aside some dreams, " Grandma mused. "Maybe forever, maybe just for a while. I didn't want to lose any of them, didn't want them to fly out the window the way some dreams do. So I brought every box in the house up to my bedroom, shut the door and locked down the window. I squeezed my eyes shut, really tight; then I imagined and imagined until the dream materialized in front of me, small like a picture on TV but see-through. Then I grabbed the dream between my hands, laid it gently in a box, and slammed the lid down on it before it could crawl away or vaporize." Grandma's face loomed, adamant and wise to eteral truths, like the marble face of a goddess immortalized in a neglected relief. Sallow light shed from the weak kitchen lamp dusted that face with a jaundiced griminess; shadows cut ravines in the cheeks and hid the knowing, ocean-gray eyes.
"Batty," mother muttered, wondering how she and this woman could share half their genes.
Carla wriggled closer to Grandma; she'd heard the story many times, but always wanted to hear it again. Grandma had taped the packages shut, so that no dreams could ooze out through the space between a box and its loose lid; she'd secured others with snugly knotted string and ribbons, and had wrapped many in paper. Whenever Grandma moved, she brought the boxes with her. Sometimes she forgot what the packages, tumbling and heaped between old trunks and bins of yellowed paperbacks, were; however, she always remembered that they were important, treasures she mustn't leave behind.
"Be careful with your dreams, don't let them get into the wrong hands," Grandma warned. "Sometimes, they can do harm. And when you box up your dreams, be sure to label them. Especially the nightmares. Years from now, before you reopen a box or send it to someone as a gift, you'll want to know which ones contain nightmares."
"Why would anyone keep nightmares?" Carla asked.
"Because she's batty," mother growled. With so many screws rolling loose, the whole belfry was collapsing and the bats were flying free; maybe she could get Grandma committed to a long-term psychiatric hospital, with the whole stay billed to Medicare.
"I heard that!" Grandma snapped. "You think, just because I'm old, I'm crazy and deaf -"
"Because you fill half my attic with empty boxes," Mother hissed. "Good thing the insurance agents never inspect the place; they'd call it a 'fire hazard' and refuse me coverage." Mother drummed her fork, licked sparkling clean of sauce, against the table. "When I get time, I'm going to clean out that attic. Any box that doesn't rattle or thud when shaken goes to the dump." Mother snatched up all the dinner plates and scraped the left-over clumps of spaghetti and clotting tomato sauce into the garbage bag; the scratch of stainless steel across porceline sent chills up Carla's spine. She crashed the plates into the sink and turned the hot water on, full force; torrents beat furiously against the dirty dishes as steam snaked upward.
"No more of this nonsense," Mother snarled over the hissing water. "You may be my mother, but I don't have to tolerate your craziness; I've tolerated it too long already. Enough is enough - the boxes are going soon. And I don't want you filling this kid's head with any more of your fairly tales. It's bad enough having one nut-case in the family, I don't want another." Mother scowled at Carla. "You understand that?"
Carla nodded mutely. Mother's anger sucked away her will, sucked away the air until she felt like gasping; it made dull bulbs glow like menacing searchlights and turned the ochre kitchen paneling into a glaring, warning-light yellow. She rose and crept towards the unlit hallway, where her thoughts could unscramble and her chest fill with nourishing air in the comforting darkness.
"It's almost my bedtime," she quipped, when mother turned to glower at her.
Hurled into the dump, a box could tear; a lid could pull loose. Some dreams were like gnats or birds; don't let these dreams, these newly freed birds, land in the wrong hands. Don't shred or incinerate your dreams; preserve them in a sacred hidey-hole. Carla remembered these commandments, asserted by Grandma's gravelly contralto as though they'd been wrought in iron. As she trudged up the stairs, the bickering down below softened to rumbles; Carla wondered how dreams, preserved for fifty years, looked and smelled. Soon, before mother tore into the attic with trash bags, she'd have to investigate.
************
"I'll clean up there," Carla exclaimed a few days later, when Mother clutched a broom, pail and box of thirty-gallon trash bags, and announced that she was going to clear all the rubbish out of the attic. "You're always saying I should do more chores."
"You're volunteering for housework? That's a first!", Mother squinted at the girl, then handed her the cleaning implements. Attic dust made mother's skin itch; the child needed to learn responsibility. "Don't dawdle. If your grandmother wanders up there, don't let her distract you with her crazy talk. Throw out any empty boxes; if you're not sure what's inside, open them." Carla nodded, then slipped upstairs.
Anemic light filtered through the narrow unwashed window; dust shrouded beaten trunks, a ricketty dollhouse and hampers overflowing with swatches of leftover cordoroy and taffeta. Arcing cobwebs glistened, intricate abstract designs woven in diamond filigree. Chips of discolored plaster had dropped from the sloped ceiling; wads of pink fiberglass poked up between the planks of raw plywood that passed under a patch of cracked linoleum by the attic entrance. Carla eased the door closed, then crept towards a pile of packages, each the size and shape of a shoe box or hatbox. The room's warm, stagnant air lulled her into a calm reverie, but she didn't feel sleepy.
"I don't know how long dreams stay intact inside those boxes," Grandma had said. "Maybe some are like mummies and keep their shape for thousands of years. Maybe some are like wood and last for centuries. Maybe others are like leaves, brown, dried and crumbling in weeks. No one knows. People hoard dreams secretly; no one talks publically about the dream worker's art."
Carla lifted a shoe box wrapped in coarse brown paper that puckered at the corners; the forward-slanting cursive, faded to sepia, read "Garden tryst". She pulled loose the yellowed adhesive tape, a strip dried to cellophane brittleness, tugged at the grimy string knotted on top and lifted the lid.
Inside the box, gnats buzzed in the tall grass and tiger lilies bloomed in a saffron haze; when Carla pressed her palm down, the grass felt like cat hair and tiny insects pricked her skin. The spicy aroma of goldenrod and summer weeds tickled her nose. A young woman, as tall as Carla's thumbnail, paced inside a gazebo of miniature bricks; Carla lowered her ear and thought she heard the rustle of the pale damask skirt and a tinkling, falsetto cough.
"What's it like, living in a box for fifty years," Carla whispered. "Does a small sun rise and set daily or is it always afternoon inside? Do you feel like a prisoner, with the sky a lid only inches above you?" As Carla held the box, awaiting the entry of another character from Grandma's dream and listening for answers, the grass faded and dried to hay. The mortar and bricks crumbled, the tiny woman fragmented into drifting particles; sand and ash covered the bottom of an ordinary, musty shoebox.
"Only two minutes," Carla muttered. Why must dream worlds decompose so fast?; entertainment of any kind should last at least as long as several TV commercials. She sneezed, wondering how much of the attic dust had come from disintegrated dreams, then reached for a hatbox wrapped in foil as slick as chrome.
The same woman stretched in an oval tub, listening to the water splash, feeling it bounce gently off her toes. Her long hair floated like kelp around her shoulders; Carla recognized the face from black and white Polaroids taken before wrinkles and sagging skin had masked Grandma's fine bone structure. The soap slipped from the woman's hand, thudding against the porceline. The water hugged her as no human ever did and sang with a lover's passion as it rained from the faucet. Floral scents, fragrant with promise, rose in a warm mist that caressed Carla's nose; she sniffed the faint aroma of cocoa from elsewhere, heard the light drumming of rain and wisps of blues music from an old record as it strained round and round on a turntable in another room. Grandma was relaxing after a day at that secretarial job she'd held before marrying; she was ready for a night with a special someone, when all light turned warmly amber and all sounds seemed as lush as velvet. Carla sniffed the perfumed vapors and knew exactly what Grandma wanted; she knew it through dream magic.
"How's it going up there?", Mother barked from the foot of the attic stairs. "I don't hear any noise. It's been ten minutes, I should hear boxes being dragged around."
"I'm working," Carla yelled. "They're small boxes, they don't make much noise." Her shoulders sagged as she watched the bathing figure dissolve into a mist of rising, popping bubbles that reflected the dusky light; noting how dim the attic had become, Carla switched on the single dangling bulb and wondered if her own shrill voice had evaporated this miniature world.
"But these dreams are too much like soap operas," she thought; romance got rave reviews, but Carla thought kissing as pointless as making her bed. She'd have to read the labels more carefully, and open only the packages that promised an interesting story. She sat cross-legged on the dusty planks and began to sort: Champagne dinner, boring; my first living room, very boring; talisman -
Carla stopped and re-read the faded script - "talisman". When she rotated the box, smaller than any others there, something thudded from side to side; Carla deciphered the words "Korean conflict" and "December 1952" in the yellowed newsprint wrapping which she then ripped away.
The amber nugget had congealed around the head of an ancient insect with enormous multifaceted eyes that reflected the light as though made from a hundred tiny green mirrors. The stone warmed in her palm, radiating heat from with, then began to vibrate gently; the eyes seemed to rotate on an invisible stalk. "Remember the three wishes," a low voice hummed from within the stone. Carla did; she clasped the stone between her hands, letting the warmth radiate up her arms and hoping that this talisman wouldn't disintegrate before she could use it.
"What are you doing, sitting on the floor? I thought you were working," A long knifelike shadow cut across Carla's lap; mother leered down, as tall as a skycraper.
"I'm working," Carla stammered, "But it takes time to open the boxes. I have to make sure they're really empty."
"OK, hand me that orange one." When Mother's glance shifted to the stacked boxes, Carla slipped the talisman into her jeans pocket. "Hopefully you won't grow up like your grandmother; I worry about you, being around her so much and her filling your head with tales. If my father hadn't taken care of her all those years, she would have ended up in the nut house. You can't support yourself if you see a face in every tree and fairy wings in every fog; that kind of person spends all day searching for leprochauns and forgets to shop for food. You know what they say about Cloud Nine, don't you?"
Carla shook her head and lifted the box wrapped in orange tissue paper; on its sun faded top, the words "last on earth" stood out in bold black print.
"Anyone can fly up to look but no one can live up there; any human who steps out and tries to make it his home falls straight through the cloud and crashes to earth. Killed on impact." Mother scanned the box in Carla's hand. "You open it; just rip the paper off, no need to be careful with this junk."
Carla looped her forefinger under a fold and tugged while Mother scrutinized the heap of remaining packages, mentally counting how many Grandma had accumulated.
"Hard to believe anyone would carry all this with her for fifty years." Mother sighed. "I shudder when I think of how things might have been without your grandfather. He kept her from becoming a packrat, like some of her aunts. When her aunt Mildred died, the relatives could barely move through her house. She'd kept every newspaper and magazine back to 1900, every receipt from every purchase, every card, every advertisement; the place was stacked floor to ceiling with papers, with only a skinny path into each room. If there was anything valuable in all that junk, diamonds or antique figurines, no one could tell; the family hired a crew to empty out everything and haul it away, no one had years to sort through it all. Your grandmother would have ended up the same way, but with a house stuffed with packaged dreams, if father hadn't insisted on order."
"These boxes only fill a corner," Carla mumbled, as she pulled away the orange wrapping and began lifting the lid.
"Is that one empty too? Filled with fantasies only she can see?" Mother began.
Carla heard a gasp behind her as a whirlwind of spinning black particles eddied up from the box, spread across the attic in a choking gray fog, then seeped through the cracks between the window and frame and under the door to disperse outdoors and through the house. She coughed as particles stung her nose and burned her throat, then inhaled deeply after the duststorm had cleared; the air seemed thin and the bulb's feeble light drained. No creaking floorboards as mother shifted her weight from foot to foot, no rustle of cotton accompanying an arm movement, no barely audible breathing - Carla spun to look behind her, then at every corner of the attic.
"Mother?" She hadn't heard the door squeak open or click shut. "Mother!"
Carla rushed down the stairs, flicking on light switches as she ran.
"Mother!", she screamed when she'd reached the second floor. Mother might have left the attic while Carla opened the box, but she couldn't have left the house. "Mother!", she screeched, louder than she'd ever screeched before. The walls echoed her shrill cry, then fell silent. No murmering from the TV, no muffled hammering and scraping from the basement where Father usually spent his free hours on woodworking projects, no shuffling of Grandma's slippers across the linoleum, no labored snoring as the old dog slept off his dinner.
"Grandma! Mother!" Carla bolted down the next flight of stairs, into the livingroom. A Reader's Digest lay balanced on the armrest of Grandma's favorite chair. Carla felt the indented cushion; the seat was warm. A string of wet dog spittle still glistened on the frayed throwrug imbedded with grizzled fur.
"Grandma! Father!" Carla banged her fist against walls, rattled closet doors, then yanked open the basement door and charged down.
"Father?" A spray of sawdust had settled around the lathe, which gripped a partly rounded spindle. Two flourescent lamps lit the workbench where Father stored screws and nails in meticulously labeled bins; four flathead screws were aligned in a row on the steel table top. The hot water boiler groaned, then shuddered as the warming cycle ended. Carla slapped the aluminum sides of the furnace; the clang of the denting metal reverberated through the house. She kicked aside rusty engine parts and moldy paperback manuals; she peered behind frosted-glass windows propped against the cinderblock wall, into a dank space barely large enough to hide a cat.
"Father! Grandma! Where are you?," she wailed as she rushed back up the steps. What had she read on the cover of the last box, before its dusky vapors had infiltrated the walls and mother had soundlessly vanished? Last person on earth? Last creature on earth? Even the old dog, too bloated and arthritic to wander beyond the kitchen and living room, had disappeared. Carla crept into the kitchen, looking under table cloths and behind chairs for shadowy places where the hound might hide if ill; she scrutinized the linoleum for gritty paw prints tracking towards the back door. She inched down the hallway, jerking open the bathroom door and ripping away the shower curtain; bathrooms were the most dangerous room in the house, her mother had said, and someone could lie injured for hours in a tub. She stole through the tauntingly silent dining room and returned to the living room's hush.
"Last person on earth?". She lifted the telephone receiver, ready to call either a friend or 911, someone who could reassure her and explain the mystery. The line was dead.
"Last person on earth? Impossible." But wasn't it also impossible to store dreams in boxes for fifty years, impossible according to all the rational people in the world, impossible to everyone but Grandma? A dream expert, a modern day sorceress, might know what was happening, but Grandma also had vanished.
Carla pointed the remote control at the television and pushed the "on" button. Static on channel 3. She frantically pushed the buttons for each successive channel. Static on channel 6. Static on channel 10. Static on all the cable channels and the public broadcasting educational channel. She turned off the TV and hurled the remote control to the floor; the plastic casing split open, spilling out a tangle of red and green wires.
"Grandma! Father! Rufus! Mother!" she called from the front porch, then stopped.
No traffic hummed monotonously on the highway across the valley; no cars growled down nearby roads or sputtered to a stop. No planes droned invisibly across the night sky. No windows clapped shut; no air conditioners whirred or clanked metallically. Mrs. O'Toole's terrier didn't yap; no balls tapped rhythmically on the unlit asphalt driveway where the Mirshom boys usually shot after-dinner hoops. No crickets clicked feverishly, no birds squawked, no mosquitos wailed near Carla's ear or dove at her flesh, no whining gnats swarmed eagerly around the porchlight. Carla heard the thump of her own heels against the concrete, the swish of her cotton shirt as it rubbed over denim, the raspy panic in her own cries; otherwise, she had entered the world of the deaf.
"Where are you all?", she cried, as she moved from her porch to the lawn.
The grass crackled under her feet. She reached down to pluck a few blades; they were as dry, brittle and pale as parchment. The stems of the irises flanking the house snapped like straw; the once silky petals crumbled at her touch, like brown leaves at the end of autumn. When she fingered a branch, hemlock needles dislodged in a shower of pale splinters; in the feeble moonlight, she could see that many branches were already bare. Clumps of leaves dangled in shriveled tatters from the oak.
"Not last person on earth, not last creature," she remembered. "Last on earth," she whimpered, "last living thing." Mother had forced her to open that box, mother had made this happen. But would she have opened it anyway, if mother hadn't been jabbering about the evils of Grandma and prodding her to act? Carla inched back to the porch and through the front door. She could live without Joshua and Mark, the class bullies. She could live without homework and quizzes, without Mother's tirades, without the O'Toole's noisy dog that kept her from falling asleep; all alone, she could probably find enough canned food on the block to feed her for years, and steal books and games from the houses to entertain herself.
"Grandma! Rufus!" she sobbed as she trudged past the hound's threadbare rug. She'd ignored the dog too often, treated him as a mere fixture. If he came back, Carla vowed, she'd buy him gourmet dogbones with her allowance and brush him until his fur glistened.
Why had Grandma saved this particular nightmare? What had she intended to do with it? Carla plodded up the last flight of stairs. Maybe, in the attic where all had begun, she'd find an answer, or a new dream that would end the nightmare. She shuffled towards the heap of unopened boxes, all drained of color in the somber topaz light. Shouldera slumped, she shoved her hands in her pockets and stared at the floor; as she sobbed, her fingers fumbled with something hard in her right pocket.
"The talisman!"
The faceted metallic eyes rotated faster and faster until her stare had locked onto their's; the stone's heat pushed through her palm until her whole body pulsed with an inner fire and her hand burned with secret powers.
"Three wishes," the spinning eyes and heart of the stone told her soundlessly, "But no more than three, when you hold me. Wish well, wish carefully."
Carla continued to stare at the stone and eye which magically suffused her with a warmth and hope she'd never known before. Then she forced herself to glance away.
"I wish for all the living things that just left earth to come back," Carla pleaded; from a tingling in her palm, she instinctively knew that this counted as one wish.
"All but Mother," she blurted. "Don't bring Mother back!"
The amber cooled and the eyes slowed to a stop; for a second, the hundred mirrored facets reflected the number "two". Carla placed the talisman carefully back in its old box, snapped on the lid and hid it beneath all the other boxes of dreams. If she ever wanted to bring Mother back, she could use her last wish.
Next door, a dog yapped; Carla wept with joy.
She flicked off the attic light and tiptoed down the stairs. Rufus limped from the kitchen and sprawled on his rug. Father cursed at something in the basement. Grandma yawned and rubbed her eyes.
"I must've dozed off, had a strange dream just now" she mumbled groggily to Carla. "Did you open any of those boxes in the attic?"
"Just a couple." Carla bent down to pat Rufus as he started to snore.
"Where's your mother? She said she was going up there to clean the place out."
"She was there for a while," Carla mumbled. "Then she left." Carla lifted the remote control and flicked through TV channels.
She wondered where Mother was, and what experiences she might recount if she ever returned.
