Summer Days Ain’t Coming Back

Prologue

The Dream began the same way the other Dreams did, but that was where the similarities ended. I stood in a world of infinite darkness while images passed before my eyes. A flash of brown hair. A dazzling smile. A glint of silver. The sirens of a police car. A woman’s scream.

And then I woke up.

xXxXx

For me it began with the Dream. I opened my eyes to my dark ceiling illuminated by the light of the moon, my vision clouded with tears. I felt a cold sweat breaking all over my body and noticed I was breathing heavily. I layed there a moment trying to calm myself down, thinking the Dream over in my head. Though the images were rapidly fading from my memory the feeling of dread stayed with me.

The dream wasn’t completely out of the ordinary for me; I had had them since I was a small child.

I was three the first time I had a Dream. Even at that age I realized it wasn’t a normal dream.

I always stood in the world of darkness. I would stand there and images would pass before my eyes. Just flashes of color at first. Over time those flashes of color would merge into a picture, sometimes several. I almost always had the Dreams more than once, and I never knew what it meant until it came true.

The first one I remember began shortly before my fourth birthday. At first it was just flashes of brown. Then of a kitten. Sometimes the kitten would be sitting staring up at me, sometimes laying playfully on the floor, and at other times curled up asleep with its little paws covering its eyes. I always woke cheerful and expectant. And on my birthday I knew I was going to see it before the day was out, I even asked my father when it was coming over. He pulled me on his lap, gave me an odd look and asked how I had found out. I just smiled and told him my Dreams had told me.

I received the kitten later in the day and named him Dreamer, after me.

I had many Dreams, mostly about trivial things, some more vivid and detailed than others. The first one that haunted me occurred when I was six. It consisted of an image of Dreamer playing with a leaf, of a car squealing, and then an empty road.

Each and every morning after the Dream I woke upset and full of dread, as if I knew something horrible were to happen, and happen soon. It had all been in separate dreams until one last night, the night it was too late.

I woke from that final Dream and I knew that Dreamer had gotten out of the house. I just knew. Without even bothering to put on my shoes I ran out of my room, down the stairs and out of the house. I ran down Orleans Avenue looking for my poor lost Dreamer. And I found him, in a mangled heap of brown fur in the middle of the road.

And I started to cry. I sat there crying for my poor dead kitty until Denise Harris, one of our neighbors and an old friend of my father’s, came home from her night shift at her current job and took me inside and called my father. I had nightmares about that one for a long time.

But the one that has always stuck with me and haunts me even now was the one that occurred only a month before my mother’s death.

I stood in a blanket of darkness; time and space seemed no more than a mere speck of dust in my presence. It was all that existed; myself and those whom I deemed fit. My mother stood before me, clad in a long white nightgown, her long, beautiful blond hair cascading down her back and shoulders, fluttering as though there were a wind. She seemed to be glowing. She looked at me sadly, tears streaming down her cheeks, clutching a red rose to her chest. Her hands were wrapped around it so tightly her knuckles were white, and there was blood slowly dripping down her arms. The longer I looked at her the more I noticed how pale she was, and that it wasn’t only her knuckles. And then, at the end, there was a single drop of blood streaking out of her hair down her forehead. It fell into her eye. She didn’t blink.

xXxXx

I awoke screaming. The only time I ever have in my entire life. I awoke screaming for my father, for my sisters, but for my mother most of all. My family came running to my room, to find me crying hysterically. I didn’t return to sleep that night, my father stayed with me and told me stories, trying to cheer me up. I didn’t sleep well after that, not until long after my mother was dead and buried. Even now I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking of my mother, a woman I never really got to know since she had died when I was seven.

I had that Dream only once, but it was certainly strong enough that the Dream was never far from my thoughts. I didn’t make the connection from the Dream to my mother’s death until years later when I recited the dream to Vic Abernathy, my dearest friend in the world.

Though I don’t remember my mother very well, I still remember the day she died as clear as if it had happened yesterday. I was sitting in my second-grade class doing my math when I suddenly began to feel very agitated. I couldn’t concentrate and just kept tapping my foot, my pencil, my fingers, basically anything I could tap until class was over.

At recess a girl I knew who was not a friend to me made the mistake of deciding to make fun of me that day, I don’t really even remember what she said to me. Her name was Xena Louise Anderson and she was notorious for her tact. Normally I wouldn’t care but on that day I was in no mood to be messed around with. I attacked her, fighting with the skills I had learned by fighting with the older boys. And after a teacher pulled me off her I ran. I ran all the way home. As I stepped in through the door I began calling for my mother, but no voice came to greet me.

The thought of the Dream hit me with so much force then I actually forgot I was awake and began roaming the house as if in a trance. I felt as if I were being lured to the attic, my mother’s sanctuary; a place I seldom went. There are no words I can think of to describe the feeling that crept through my body as I ascended those stairs. I think I knew the moment I reached the attic landing that my mother was dead. Even before I saw the blood. Even before I saw the body lying on the couch she kept up there for her to sit and read her many books. She was dressed in her long white nightgown, her long hair, which she usually wore up in a bun was loose and framed her pretty face. Her right arm hung off the couch, blood dripping from her wrist into the puddle that was slowly spreading around her; a wilting rose lay in the pool of blood. Thankfully, her eyes were closed.

I stood there staring at her for what seemed like eternity, time lost all meaning when I was in that room. I didn’t move, I didn’t blink, I didn’t breathe. I stood there until the police came and took me back down to my father. Apparently he had gotten there long before I had and had called the police and such, and then left. My father hadn’t handled my mother’s death very well.

xXxXx

For me it began with the Dream, for it was to haunt me for the rest of the year—and, perhaps, the rest of my life—but for the others, say Vic, Jimmy, and Sarah, it began with the party. And as for Bobby, well, I never quite knew what that boy had tucked up his sleeve. And even now I wonder where it began for him.