Ellen Akins

His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Here you are. Because you don’t believe it, do you?” She wanted not to, whatever it was, and, considering her, he seemed to be crediting her with knowing. “That there’s a findable future?” he said. “Or a world somewhere else with apparently pointless space between here and there and nothing along the way except repeated attacks on your senses. Which you’ll eventually be able to blame for making you so dull that you can’t recognize the future or the world once you’ve found it.” Now even her speech was spellbound, and she only looked at him, with the world shrinking to an understanding between them, intimate and completely foreign to her. “When, to know the world, all a man really needs is to be known,” he said. “And I know you.”

He didn’t want to sleep. If he slept and the nightmare didn’t appear, he’d have to admit as fact what so far he only suspected and could still dismiss as fancy: It wasn’t a nightmare. It never was. It was the essence of daily life, stripped of the hum and shine and glancing distraction that made it glibly livable. When a nightmare emerged, the surface was merely wearing thin, a man was less and less satisfied with going willy-nilly across it, less and less convinced that moving light was an effective evasion, that what he could evade so easily would ever have mired him anyway. Underneath was helplessness, and a whole shifting sea of women couldn’t save him from the one he was bound to find, to fall for and finally see what those women with their strange dark eyes saw in him.