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In Dreams

We see them: the sales clerk who pacifies the abusive customer; the elderly man who ignores the disrespect of the young and holds his head high; the scorned teenager who hides his hurt and walks away. Surely they feel anger. Does it merely evaporate or is it contained and festering within?
What of the greatest rage of all, that of the mother forced to deny her protective urges and stand by in silence? Is it only with conscious effort that she maintains her serenity? If she weakens, will the demon win?

That is the truth she fears, for each night, unrepressed violence fills her dreams: stories of abandonment, loss, death. There are enemies, usually faceless, sometimes not. Her knuckles yearn to pummel their faces into pulp but she is powerless. The enemy laughs at her futile efforts as she struggles to move through air thick with her own impotence. She grows hysterical in her fury, her arms flaying in the air, her legs kicking blindly. Her hands, balled into tight fists, move currents of air around the enemy but stop within a fraction of their face. She grapples to reach them.

Fingers stretch wide for their mouth, pushing inward to the throat, shoving viciously inside. She pushes and pulls apart the jaw, hears the bones crunch as they break within the skull, sees the eyes bulge in shock. All the time she cries a rage that cannot be contained any longer.

A stab of pain in her chest jolts her from her sleep. Her breath comes in short staccato bursts; her hands, still clenched, feel stiff. She thinks to check them for blood, then stops.

She slows her breathing, turns on her side to face her husband and touches his arm. She needs to remind herself of what is real, what is not. The woman in the dream frightened her, but was not her. She is incapable of such things.

Learn more about this author, Linda Gallant Potts.
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