Shaun Turner

An Evening Appointment

           Our therapist doesn't have a receptionist. You'd tell me that its because our appointments are so late, but we have never seen one. She just keeps a clipboard on this shitty Formica ledge, but when we sign in, she must hear the faint scratching of pen against paper—she knows it is us—and she comes running.

           We give her the check, tell her that we haven't been sleeping.

           In the nightmare, we are six. Our therapist, wearing a white lace dress, stands next to our childhood bed. She pulls our hand and drags us through a trapdoor concealed in the panels of our closet ceiling. Once we are on the trailer's roof, our therapist opens her arms wide and says, all of this can be yours. 

           In the nightmare, it is always thundering. Rain drives against the aluminum roof—a coin sound—but we never get wet, even though our therapist is drenched. 

           How she smiles at us. She tells us that dreams aren't supposed to make sense, that they are anxieties, figments. 

           We don't tell her how when we wake up we climb out our bedroom window to the fire escape. We climb from tread to worn tread up the thin ladder to stand on the tenement roof. This city is far from home—its old water tanks glisten from the streets, the lights fuzzy in the tinny falling raindrops.

           We don't tell her how, when we stand on the edge and look down, we see the cars and men like toys until we feel the spread of wind against some great black wings.