Sarah
Noah Bacon
Sarah smelled like smoke, which confused her for a while because her family hadn’t made a campfire before bed like her mom had promised. Everyone had been moving so fast when she woke up. It seemed like she was in trouble, that ‘trouble face’ she feared was all around her. She wondered if she had been misbehaving somehow. She thought to herself, “adults are so scary and mean, why is no one listening to me?” Everyone had been listening to her, of course, but years in the crucible of first-responder duty had sewn their lips shut with the frayed strings of their hearts.
Sitting in the new bright and bad smelling room, Sarah couldn’t stop thinking about the dream she had had in the Policeman’s car. She dreamed she was dreaming. It was a very confusing dream. In the dream’s dream, she was flying, soaring, and she could smell her mom’s hair all around her. Sarah saw mountains below her and a sweet stream hiding in their verdant crease. To her, it looked sparkly and happy, so she flew closer. She dreamed the sky turned to water and her mom’s hair became seaweed forests like she’d seen on the TV shows. She dreamed she was a TV fish, looking for her mom behind every bit of seaweed. Sarah picked up pretty rocks from the ocean floor to give to Mommy when she found her. The seaweed grew closer and closer together and finally Sarah had to drop her rocks and swim upwards so that she could move at all. She dreamed she was now in shallow water. The big waves were far away and she was standing in the water looking at them. Everything was so calm. Then the waves came closer. The sand dropped out from below her feet and the waves were on top of her. She knew she was a good swimmer, her mom had told her so. This time though, she was terrified because she couldn’t remember how to swim. Then the worst part of the dream happened. Sarah felt half her dream pop like a big bubble and she was being picked up and pulled. It felt like the rollercoaster her dad let her go on when they visited Grandma. It felt like her favorite TV show when they moved really fast to get around the bad people. Sarah felt like one of the bad people, but she was moving so fast. It was a hard dream to dream. Sarah was moving fast and she had been picked up and now she was outside her house, and the whole house was like a flashlight. The flashlight was pointed straight at her and she couldn’t look away or get away from it as she moved so fast in the arms of someone so fast. Then she was sleeping in the strange peoples’ car.
Sarah didn’t like thinking about the dream. She knew that dreams don’t make your clothes smell strange. When she went to bed her dress smelled like spaghetti. She wanted her dress to smell like spaghetti again. She loved campfires and marshmallows and fireflies and flashlights, but right now thinking about the fire dream made her stomach feel like it was trying to punch its way out of her tummy. So instead of the dream, Sarah focused on her dress. It was her favorite dress, it had flowers on it with ladybugs on the flowers and little kittens walking around the flowers smelling them. Lots and lots and lots of little tiny pictures over and over again. Sarah liked to look at them during school to see if the kittens were ever misbehaving and eating the ladybugs. They were all always smiling and smelling and no one was ever misbehaving. Sarah liked that. She was smiling when the strange lady came in. The strange lady was not smiling. She smiled at Sarah, but her smile made Sarah sad. The strange lady asked if they could talk about the fire. Sarah really wanted to hug Mommy.
Noah is a UHMC student currently taking English 104, Introduction to Creative Writing, taught by Paul Wood.
