literature

dream eater

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Kit keeps her nightmares in a jar on the floor next to her bed. The jar used to have peanut butter in it—SKIPPY® Reduced Fat Super Chunk!—but she washed it out and took off the label and wrote her name on its rust-colored top and now, there they are. They aren’t too happy about it, all squeezed together in that little plastic cylinder, but Kit is pretty sure nightmares don’t have any civil rights or anything so whatever.

For a while she tried a dream catcher to give them some sass instead, one her sister Jenny got her at a thrift store for fifty cents, but it turned out to be kind of a crock. Kit hung it over her bed and it let its ruffled, dirty feathers dangle right over her face, like the dreams of an indigenous people trampled into the dirt, but if anything it just attracted more nightmares. She imagined them at their nightmare meetings laughing, Hey, would you get a load of this chump? Actually thinks those things work! and then swooping down on her house in droves just out of spite. But Kit doesn’t mind because now they’re the chumps all caught up in a peanut butter jar and they can just fucking rot in there forever for all she cares.

“I think that’s a little mean,” Jenny tells her sometimes, usually whenever Kit shakes the jar up to make them fight. They get all rattled and riled and start biting one another. “Maybe you should just let them go.”

“Maybe you’re just jealous that you haven’t got a jar too,” Kit says, tossing it up in the air like she’s playing catch with herself. She drops it on purpose and lets it roll under the bed. Jenny pouts, because Kit knows that her sister gets the worst nightmares of all, and that Jenny’s own crummy dream catcher isn’t doing shit.

Eventually, though, the nightmares stop coming, because they like being terrible and wild and free and word had got around about the peanut butter jar under the bed in the room with the indigo curtains and all of them were like Oh hell no to that. Kit waits and waits under her thrift store dream catcher like a predator, a tiger stalking the underbrush, but even after a few nights nothing shows up. She takes her nightmare jar and shakes it like crazy, and they start hissing and clawing and scratching each other to pieces, but they’re still the same old nightmares and she just isn’t feeling it.

------

At school, Kit’s friends aren’t really that sympathetic to her sudden loss of nightmares. They pull their orange, hard-plastic chairs together in the minutes before American History to listen to her whine under the fluorescent lights.

“Just find something else to do,” Lizzie tells her, but Kit thinks Lizzie has weird teeth so she never listens to anything that comes out of them. Everyone more or less agrees when it comes to the jar thing, though.

"Isn't that what you wanted in the first place? To get rid of them?" Kelly asks. She's wearing a headband that she thinks is cool, but isn't.

“Yeah, okay, whatever. I was tired of it anyway,” Kit says, trying to sound aloof.

But back at home just looking at the jar full of nightmares is driving her up the wall. They’re not even scary anymore. If anything they’re afraid of her, just a little bundle of bruised shadows all tangled up in themselves. Their eyes crescent into red half-moons whenever she comes near, furious and frightened all at once.

So Kit takes the jar and puts on her poofy slippers to muffle the squeaky floorboards in the hallway and she sneaks into Jenny’s room. It’s always kind of cluttered, full of fairy figurines and feathers and all that new age junk. It lines the walls like she’s nested in it, cocooned in a shell of garage sale garbage. And then there’s Jenny all asleep under her shitty dream catcher with a haze of nightmares flowering like nuclear clouds over her head.

At first, Kit wasn’t that great at catching nightmares. They were sly and quick and didn’t think the peanut butter jar looked particularly inviting. Now she’s an expert. One minute they’re terrorizing an eleven-year-old and the next: imprisoned. Kit holds the jar close to her eyes and shakes. The nightmares tumble around, horrified and confused, and she laughs—but not too loud, because like hell she’ll let Jenny know she was doing her a solid.

“I think maybe my dream catcher is working,” Jenny tells her the next day on the bus to school. Normally the sisters avoid each other outside of the house, so Kit is already irritated to see her.

“Well thank God, I thought you were getting ripped off. Like, do they not have Indian shamans to bless them at the factory in China? What’s the deal?”

“Shut up, I’m serious. I was having a really bad one last night and then it just, I don’t know, it went away.”

“Yeah that’s definitely a sign. I think we, as a culture, were just like, forgiven for the Trail of Tears.”

Jenny folds her arms up and pouts. Jenny has, by now, refined pouting into an exotic art. She becomes a portrait of scowls—one you could sell for millions. “Whatever, just forget it, Kitty.”

But Kit doesn’t just forget it. She comes back every night to snare Jenny’s nightmares, squeezing more and more into the tiny prison. They fill every space, every crevice, although occasionally one or two of them escape when she opens up the jar to add more. They slither up her wrists like eels before vanishing into the ceiling.

------

Kit wakes up one morning with her arms throbbing. The escaped nightmares have left behind strange rashes and dark, scabbed lesions that make her skin look bubbled and sick. She itches one of the blisters and it stings in a way that she didn’t know she liked. She thinks of letting more of the nightmares out, but it’s too fun to kick them around and listen to their wailing.

Less and less of them have been coming to Jenny’s room. Kit supposes they don’t feel so fierce once they hear about the peanut butter jar. But nightmares are haughty and bitter things and Kit thinks there might be just one more lurking around in the corners. But that night when she suits up with her jar and her furry slippers and creeps in through the bedroom door, she finds no nightmares.

She sees dreams.

They fill the room in a symphony of colored lights, wondrous and ethereal. They float around her sister in clusters of rainbow clouds, flickering like purple-red bursts of nebulae. They glow faraway moons, beautiful and alien all at once. A white-gold radiance encompasses the room and the air is filled with a nameless harmony. They waterfall down the walls in cascades of light, energy, and sound and Kit takes her jar and unscrews the lid and stuffs one of them inside.

The dreams flee the room like a flock of startled birds, bursting into the night sky outside, but Kit already has her prize. She sits on the floor and presses her forehead to the jar's clear plastic side. The captured dream is drowning in the weight of the nightmares, shoved into cylindrical corners and beat against the walls, but she can still spot its wraithlike glow through the plastic and it is the most beautiful thing that she has ever seen. She begins to laugh, elated, overflowing, and it wakes Jenny up.

“What’re you doing in my room?” she asks, squinting through the darkness. Kit has her back to her but she can see something gleaming in her lap.

“Everything,” Kit says.

“Whatever.”

The next night, Kit knows she shouldn’t try for more dreams, but her fingers itch to hold them. She imagines rainbows in her hands, her jar like stained glass, casting prismatic warmth across the walls. She wonders how many dreams she can take before Jenny begins to notice. She wonders why she’s never had any herself.

------

It’s hot as shit outside but Kit wears a sweater to school anyway. She doesn’t want to hear any crap about the marks on her arms, and besides, the prickly wool rubbing against the abrasions makes her feel giddy. She’s wondering how to find more nightmares to bump into and more dreams to ensnare when Lizzie with the dumb teeth invites her to a sleepover after school. She sees colored lights in the back of her eyes and feels her skin aching.

“Just don’t bring that stupid jar,” Lizzie warns.

“I’m so done with that,” Kit says. She flutters her eyelashes with all the faux-boredom she can muster.

“What’re you into now?” Kelly asks her. Kelly is kind of boring, but easy to impress.

“Stealing,” Kit says. Kelly gasps while Lizzie rolls her eyes.

“Oh my God, like shoplifting? What do you take?”

Kit leans back in her hard-plastic seat, preening. “Anything that shines.”

On the way home, on the school bus, Jenny slides into the seat next to Kit. She looks wary and Kit shoves her shoulder. “What is it now?”

“Remember what I was telling you about my dream catcher?”

Kit shrugs noncommittally.

“I think maybe, I don’t know, it’s working too well? I haven’t been getting even regular dreams lately. I go to sleep and it’s just kind of dark.”

“So, what?”

“So, what about you? Is yours working?”

“Oh my God, Jen, don’t be so ungrateful. The slaughter of a native people is being absolved like right before our very eyes and you’re whining about it. Take that dream catcher and frame it.” Jenny switches seats in a huff at that one, but Kit isn’t feeling as smug as she wants to.

At home, she sees Jenny taking down her grubby second-hand dream catcher. She wants to give her some crap about it, but can’t think of anything to say, and so she just goes back to her own room instead. Kit sits on her bed with the peanut butter jar. The nightmares and the dreams can’t stand being in it together. Whenever Kit shakes it, it looks like worlds ending and galaxies burning up, and it’s just so fucking rad she can barely handle it. But Jenny’s dreams have all dried up. They, too, are afraid of what will happen if they come into the house. The jar is bursting with shadows and sunlight, but Kit wants more.

She packs the jar away in her Hello Kitty tote. Eventually, her mom calls from downstairs and the two drive off to Lizzie’s house.

------

Despite Lizzie’s sister who also has weird teeth bugging them all night and the unbuttered popcorn during a seriously lame showing of Love Actually, Kit thinks is this more or less best sleepover she’s ever been to. She’s imagining the kind of dreams she can steal here, a buffet of bright foreign baubles laid out for an opportunistic traveler like herself. The sores on her skin have started to ooze with something dark. But then Kelly is saying something about how she wants to be a vet when she grows up or whatever and Kit spots a spark of ultraviolet. It crackles across the tip of Kelly’s ear, sizzling down the lobe like lightning, and it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

“What was that?” Kit asks. She feels a stab of hunger, but not from her stomach.

“Oh, well, I was just saying it would be really cool. I mean, I love animals, and I’d get to help them all day.” More sparks, falling like fireworks, bloom from the back of Kelly’s head. Kit grabs the jar from her bag, unscrews the lid, and clamps it shut over Kelly’s dreams.

The jar bursts color. Light reflects around the room like food coloring spilled into a supernova. The jar's plastic walls sizzle with fever and heat and Kit’s eyes fill with stars. Kelly stares at nothing and Lizzie is screaming “What was that, what did you do?!” with her mouth wide open and those stupid teeth on full display. But now that Kit’s seen it, she knows where to look and off comes the lid of the jar and soon Lizzie’s dreams are gone too. The jar vibrates in her hands, erupting with an energy it can’t release, spewing starlight from its rim, but Kit needs more.

She springs through the suburban streets outside, snatching up delusions and daydreams, thieving every fantasy she can get her hands on. She steals through windows and ransacks idling cars while her arms drip black pus. She grabs wishes and hopes and passions and crams them inside the jar, stuffing it to its limits. She rips her mother’s yearning from her chest and claws Jenny’s ambitions from the back of her skull. Kit holds everything that is beauteous and terrible ever imagined in her hands, and her world goes quiet. The people around her collapse, drained and listless without the things she’s taken. They fall as silent and still as a blackout, empty husks with unseeing eyes. They breathe and blink and wander into sleepless stupors.

Kit lays on her bed, incandescent, the white heat of a star in a dark expanse. The jar pulses against her chest, radiating time and space. She stays alone in the glowing silence and thinks that, maybe later, she’ll open up the jar and let everything out again. The whole town will thank her and give her the key to the city, whatever that is, and she’ll listen to everyone talk about how wonderful she is. But she supposes she’ll hold onto it for now, maybe until she can find some dreams of her own, or at least until she feels happy again.
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Kestrad's avatar
Oh my god

(Congratulations, that and an incoherent as;dlfkj;;;;;; is my first response to everything you write.)