log: joey & ella, in a dream Who: Joey & Ella What: We found dreams in a zombieless place. Where: Dreamland. When: Now(complete). Warnings: None, but some sads.
She ran until her lungs heaved, and hurt and her feet slapped at the ground, and the hallway expanded and contracted like a concertina, door after door that they flew through, pale-washed green walls and antiseptic smell and swinging doors until the last set they burst through, it wasn’t the hospital
The heat was wet and sticky and sweet, like magnolia blooms. The dark didn’t bring with it relief, she’d learned that when she was small but it was better than the way a New York winter crept into your bones cruel as anything. Ella had learned to take summer the way it came, blooms and trees and the cool of being in church, everything white and bright and peaceful. Sweat now began to trickle down from the back of her neck, the in-between bowed head and the line of the sundress. It was worn-soft pink, the color of the curling inside of a magnolia petal and as silk-soft with wearing as a dozen like it she’d tossed right on after Ian had made her feel like her skin was inside out and back to front. She hadn’t kept a single one, trading them out for shirts someone else had worn, from racks and racks of them at Goodwill, but she wore it now with her knees pale beneath the eyelets of the cotton lace.
The playground was like she remembered it. The playground had been torn up and knocked down, replaced by houses that looked like kids had drawn them, all windows and doors and a tarmac driveway that went to nowhere. The asphalt here was weathered-gray and the roundabout squeaked and juddered as it circled in the breeze from nowhere. Ella’s dreams were long stretches of nothing, warmth from home licking up over bare arms, bare skin and the aimless spinning of a swing whose chains had been twisted and twisted until the world ruptured into a soap-bubble of blurred lines and wavery reality.
He thought that it might be a nightmare, the peaceful beginnings of one. Like vacationers that soaked up sun and dangled their feet into cool blue water before the sharks swarmed. Like the way the yard got on those days before an inmate rioted or went for the great escape only to be met with bullets in the back. No, Joey didn't trust peaceful. It seemed like every calm led only to a storm, and he couldn't even find trust in the cooling zephyr that smelled nothing like all of the death he was getting used to lately.
It was warm out, a sweet heat that told him this could be zombie Georgia as well as it could be anywhere. He wasn't thinking that it was a dream, and he certainly wasn't thinking that it might not be his dream. The playground seemed abandoned as an apocalypse, and he approached it with hackles raised. He carried a rusted over machete with him, something that'd turned up in a neglected tool shed. They'd quickly learned that guns were efficient against the walking dead, but also served as a beacon to attract others. Quiet weapons were best.
He rounded the monkey bars with caution, drawn to the sound of shoes scraping asphalt and gravel, the rattle and clink of swing chains. He saw the back of her, the sundress and the blond, and it made him pause. Coming across the living was rare. She didn't seemed stranded or scared, and it wasn't until she twisted and released, spin-spinning, that he caught a good enough glimpse of her face. Recognition burned, confusion blistered until he was suddenly up at the swing, weapon dropped on the pavement so that he could grab one of the chains and still her swinging.
"What the hell are you doing here?" He asked with eyes that jolted up to the horizon where a whole lot of nothing went on forever, suspiciously free of monsters and decay.
Ella didn’t doubt the dreaming. She didn’t question the soft, coaxing heat of the south instead of New York and she didn’t question the place lost in childhood, forgotten for anything but dreaming ghosts. The swing jerked, and twisted and the chains ground together in a jolting clatter. Her feet came down onto bare, dusty ground, toes first and her face turned up to his, the carelessness of the spinning without thought was written over, with surprise and then concern and then recognition, like watercolor sweeping in great strides over blank paper. She had had months of New York and the familiar, of hiding from a past shut off from her by doors that locked and wouldn’t open. He looked the same, the frenetic anxiety was familiar from styrofoam cups and sweet pastries, and her head turned to look along the horizon, obediently following his gaze.
Nothing manifested. It wouldn’t; home was sleepy, contained. It waited, Ella knew. For the vacation days that clustered in the depth of winter, for army green marching back off base and into houses too small to hold them. She stranded fingers through the stilled chain links, worked her toes into the red dust.
“What are you doing here?” Her eyes, untroubled, dropped to the machete and livid fear quickened. “Why have you got that?”
Joey's gravedirt eyes patrolled the distance, lip tucking into his teeth while he held onto the reign of Ella's swing. He positively glowered at the lack of blood and biters, finding the serenity even more perturbing than any fresh massacre. As off-putting as zombies were, the fact that he'd somehow stumbled out of their realm without intention was extremely worrying. What if he couldn't find his way back to the others? Of course, dreams were a perfect platform for erasing worry in the blink of an eye. When Ella spoke, he glanced down at her with a creased brow, and in that moment he forgot about any intention of seeking out his lost siblings.
"I was.. canvassing.." That seemed about right, and likely. Joey motioned back to where he was certain he'd parked his bike, and even if it hadn't been there a moment earlier, it was now. Looming black motorcycle on its stand beside a fence, patiently waiting for his return. He looked at Ella, in tune with the fact that he wasn't supposed to be able to see her anymore. He wasn't supposed to be able to see anyone. He was stuck at the prison, and the awareness of that juxtaposed with the fact that he was here made for something that should have been confusing but was ultimately shrugged off.
"Protection," he told her. After all, she was without a weapon herself. That must've been why he was here, never mind the how. "Gotta protect you."
Fear in a dream had to be held onto for it not to dissipate; fear had to be claimed. Ella let go of the swing and fear with both hands, feet scuffing free of the ground as the swing bounced and juddered and stilled. She didn’t know what canvassing meant, but she looked across the line of tattered shirt-sleeve and dirty fingers to where the motorbike sat beside worn white paint. He was behind a wall, a door without a handle or a key, dead things creeping out of nightmares to eat him whole. He was sad, and Ella knew that with all the certainty she knew Max was mad or sad or scared or all three at once, and she leaned her weight on the chain closest to him to tug at the hem of his shirt.
“Protect me from what?” There was nothing at home to be scared off. It was small and it was far off and she felt closed in, like a bird in a cage maybe, drawn close to the window to see all the things out there that could be flown to if someone just opened the door. There were raised voices and the low, cold tone of displeasure to be fearful of, but that didn’t need protection. “I’m home.” She smiled, coaxing encouragement. If he was here, was Max? Was Beth? Her forehead furrowed, “How are you here? I’m not meant to be here either.” They were in New York. The New York that didn’t remember college friends, or days in the park. Her fingers worried at the hem of the cotton dress.
Joey had felt the need to keep her away from certain things in the waking world. He kept her away from the truth for awhile until she proved incapable of being scared off by stories of felonious youth and prison tattoos. He kept her away from the words he used with his siblings, but sometimes he failed at that too and cursed when he was tired of the frustration that stemmed wholly from himself. Zombies, the source of all danger in his waking life, were forgotten in that moment. Priorities whisked away on the flippancy of all dreams. Protect her from what? He looked down at the weapon, and his eyebrows knotted with absence of an answer.
"I dunno," the truth. "Everything maybe," and that was the truth too. Bad things existed everywhere. Or maybe they only seemed to because trouble followed the Alexander family like it was attached to their ankles by a prison yard chain. In the dream that idea took root and made sense, because it was so deeply ingrained that it felt factual. The only one that seemed to skate clean of trouble by the skin of his teeth was Shane. Joey begrudgingly rolled his shoulders.
He looked around when Ella described this place as home. It felt warm here, like the sunshine was thicker somehow. The distant homes looked fuzzy against the blue of the horizon, with pastel smears that he figured meant little gardens. Yeah, if this was anyone's home, he figured it would be Ella's. "I dunno," he repeated on this new subject of how he was here. "I was somewhere else before," although he couldn't quite remember where.
Trouble had followed Ella around like a puppy dog with a slipped leash; it didn’t belong, it wasn’t hers, but it found her all the same. The soft dress and the bare feet didn’t say a whole lot about history or learning from it, but babies, anonymous men, death and fear were all caught in the shapeless shadow from the sun beyond the swing-set. Everything, and Ella smiled, and pushed on her toes until the swing tilted back, the chain taut in the cage of Joey’s fingers. “You sound like Max,” she said, certain of herself and of her sister. The sister who had been dark and narrow and slight and nothing like her, but was now blond, the symmetry of their faces undeniable. Max who knew trouble like a lover, who dipped in and out of shadows until they stained her black. Max wanted to protect her, to protect Beth, to protect Luke. Secrets danced by themselves in the corners of rooms, were ashes and nothing without hands behind them.
“Maybe you should sit and swing,” Ella didn’t know where he had come from either, but the dream was thin-washed in places, hazy like the minute before waking. “And put that down. You don’t need it, not here.” Bad things did not exist in the places of her childhood, everything was army-regimented and ordered. The General did not allow for bad things to intrude where life remained orderly in his absence.
“This place isn’t here anymore,” she said, her weight leaned heavily against the opposite chain, the seat tilting upward, drunkenly at one corner. “But it’s here now.” Her smile was free, unconcerned. It was not like the hotel. Changes made did not cause alarm. This place did not exist and if it had been altered substantially, she wouldn’t see it again. Waking, perhaps, there would have been a kernel of guilt that flowered concern for a mother that had never answered calls. There was nothing now. “You were where the dead things are.” She remembered. Worry. Fright. He’d sounded desolate, like the color drained out of him. “I’m not there, remember? You don’t have to protect me. Neither does Max.”
"What if I break it?" He said of the swing. The fossilized amber of his eyes took in the jangle of swing chains and the smooth curve of a rubber seat. The question was real, tone dented like the skeptical tick of his eyebrow as he looked the swing and her over. Swings were meant for those that smiled, those that burned like pretty white-gold phosphorescence with their innocence. Playgrounds were for those that didn't taint the world and were left yet untainted by it as well. He wasn't convinced that he should be on a swing, and he wasn't convinced that he should be around Ella for the same reason.
Her smile was unburdened by his company, and Joey didn't want to be uncomfortable because of that. He didn't want to feel like he was a bad thing that didn't belong in the sunshine of this dream. Her smile was free as birds, and he didn't think that anybody had ever smiled at him like that. It made his stomach tight and his mouth dry, the newness of it. And even that reaction, hidden invisible inside of himself, made him feel guilty.
It was like looking in on everything from the outside, and Joey knew that he was being a fool. Standing there awkwardly by the swing, hesitant like he thought joining in on something so wonderful and simple might send the dream crashing to the ground, a broken snowglobe. Smiles and glass and sunshine to be swept up like everything else he ruined.
When Ella told him that he didn't need the blade, Joey glanced down. But the handle was no longer in his hand, all signs of rust and blood were gone from his grip and in the machete's stead were two daffodils. They bloomed bright, yellowgold with stamens that glowed like the sun. He handed them to her when he took a seat on the swing beside hers. She'd said that he didn't need to protect her, and he must have believed her because nobody was defending anyone with some flowers. Joey seemed strangely unworried about it at the moment, because he realized that she was right. This wasn't the place with the dead that moved like this living. This place was a dream that no longer existed, it was a lost city in Ella's own head.
"I remember," he told her while digging his boot heels into the ground and pushing off for a swing. "You're not there, and I still am." He'd be back there soon enough.
She laughed. It hadn’t been years and it hadn’t been months; she’d laughed with Max, and she’d leaned against the wall with her fingers clasped around her own sides and watched Beth toddle on fat little legs, carrying around a blanket like she was a queen, and laughed at that too. But it didn’t feel free. Guilt bound up her laughter, tied its hands and kept it sneaking in corners. She kicked her legs out in front of her and she swung, the chain flexing and jangling, like bells in a not-so-distant church. He was meek, as if he’d never swung before, and maybe he hadn’t.
“You’re here now,” she said, and she wound her fingers around the flowers, pinked a fingertip around the frilly stamen. It made her think of flowers gathered up in vases, kept on white tables, ledges, the intrusive beep-beep-beep quiet but intruding. Ella’s face slackened, her hands stilled on the flowers and her swing slowed to a standstill, just the rock of weight back and forth as the machines chugged away. “But you’ll go away,” simple like sugar on the tongue. “It isn’t real.”
She parsed the landscape as it muted, shifted. The swing was a bench, hard plastic, and the grass ahead was pale green walls, an endless corridor. Her feet were bare and the red dust clung to her hem and the machines beeped and heaved behind a line of identical doors, all white. “Do you dream things?” Ella looked at him, sat on the bench beside her and her hands were full of flowers but they were all dead, dry things left to wait in vases. She let them drop, scattered. “Things you don’t want?”
The world was warm again, and he couldn't remember it being so glowy gold in his whole damn life. Not even when he'd been a kid had everything seemed okay. Joey got the chance to kick the swing just a little bit higher before everything dissolved into the bleached halls of a hospital. But in that moment, with his feet in the air and the wind rushing back to meet him on that single, high-bound swing.. it reminded him of youth. He'd never been one for swinging really, but he'd been one for racing down sidewalks with shoplifted sodas in his pockets, angry shopkeepers growling at his heels. That had been youth for him. That, despite the obvious delinquency and danger it presented, had been freedom. That was wind in his face and a smile.
Then it was gone, and the swing was gone, and the hospital was here. Joey didn't know hospitals. He knew broken fingers that his mom splinted up with popsicle sticks and duct tape and reprimands. He knew burns treated with ice packs, and he knew little sisters that coughed weak and all through the nights when Joey strained to stay awake just so he could listen to their continued breathing. But he didn't know hospitals. He knew school nurses who gave the shots that schools said they all needed, and he knew prison hospitals that seemed as plain and emotionless as war infirmaries. But this was different, and he knew that because he didn't recognize it, Ella must have.
He looked at her, and he looked at the dead flowers. "Yeah, I dream 'em," he said. Voice quiet like nothing as the petals hit the tile and sprayed out like dead kaleidoscope bits broken free of their antique glass, useless and colorless.
She had never stolen a thing in her life. She had never run anywhere but after Max, and she’d given up on that at five years old, wistful over a sister who would always be older and better, and smarter and strong. She had had neighbors who knew her and who told her mother everything and a single boy in her life who had sticky-damp hands when he held hers and tried to kiss her and didn’t at a church social. There had been no freedom but swinging and Ella dreamed herself back there over and over, when life was as simple as kicking off in the dust and flying for as long as it took you to swing back to the ground.
But this wasn’t swinging. She dreamed this too, over and over and the corridor yawned wider and longer and she let the last of the flowers spill from her lap as she stood. She knew the hospital down to the cracked ceiling tile above her head and she craned her neck back to look at it. Every single tile was fissured, broken right down the middle, mirrors one after the other. Ella knew hospitals, she knew waiting rooms with cookies and tracts and she knew cafeterias, singing in amongst other people, voice floating upward like a flock of birds all taking flight at the same time. She knew waffle blankets, and hospital-clean sheets, and the cool side of the pillow always warm.
“Do you run?” She held out her hand, fingers reaching beneath the sleeve of overlong flannel shirt, sneakers peeking beneath the hems of her jeans, and she looked behind her, like sickness might seep out under the doors and take him too. She’d dreamed, in the beginning, of Max waxy beneath the sheets, of her mother. Her fingers spread, and panic crept up her spine, and the machines began to beep faster, quicker as her own pulse quickened in her ears.
On TV, they always made the hospitals seem lively with upbeat doctors or kooky doctors or doctors who popped pills and fucked nurses in broom closets. But there didn't seem to be any doctors here, there didn't seem to be anyone save for Ella and himself. Joey could hear muffled voices that rose and floated like swamp fog down the long corridor of endless hospital rooms. He thought he heard crying and he thought he heard whispers, the hushed kind of voices that nurses took on when they didn't want to disturb the sleeping or the dead. The hospital was bright and the halls were bleached out like it was supposed to be a comfort, but it still felt like a nightmare. It felt wrong to be here, like this was the kind of place where things just happened without rhyme or fucking reason and part of him knew that he couldn't fix things at hospitals, sometimes nobody could.
Sam. He remembered Sam in the hospital, all wrapped up and tubed up with machines that breathed for her. She'd looked so small, she was always so small, and he hadn't been able to handle it. He couldn't handle this. When the beeping picked up speed, so did his heart, and the taste in his mouth was cold, flat metal. Machete rust and fear. Joey took her hand without saying anything about being able to, and her jerked her arm without waiting for any gunshot to say go. He ran down the corridor, her flannel flapping like wings beside him. He knew it was the cowardly thing to do, and he hated leaving whomever it was with the machines that beeped like heart attack chaos, but he did it. Good for nothing, he did it.
She ran. She didn’t think of leaving-behind because there was no one to leave, just papery skin dry as dead leaves over bones that shouldn’t be felt in a handshake. She had forgotten the faces of the nurses and she didn’t want to learn them again, and her heart ached like old tears cried in the middle of the night and she couldn’t remember a single doctor but once, who had been coldly clinical about a prognosis and had later, a little shamefacedly apologized for brusqueness, a nurse hovering in the back as she’d tried to feed Beth and listen at the same time. Her hand was small, and her fingers cold, but she ran because if she didn’t, Ella thought maybe she’d drown in it, all those doors and machines, or maybe they’d hook her up to one and she’d die too.
She ran until her lungs heaved, and hurt and her feet slapped at the ground, and the hallway expanded and contracted like a concertina, door after door that they flew through, pale-washed green walls and antiseptic smell and swinging doors until the last set they burst through, it wasn’t the hospital at all.
It was small and it was white, and it was dark, night through the windows and there were candles massed at the altar and the pews were plain pine, worn slippery through people sitting in them. Ella stopped, at the back of the old church from home, the one she’d sung in Sundays with the piano drawn up to the foot of the steps and her fingers went loose in Joey’s, quiet. Calm. This was more home than the playground had been, and she tugged - once - on his hand as she walked toward the pew at the back and slid in, breath still rapid-quick as she sank down onto hard wood.
If Joey didn't know hospitals, he really didn't know churches. He knew the little white picket fenced chapels that were situated all up and down the Las Vegas strip, usually beside the bars were bad decisions were planted and harvested with I Dos. Before that, he knew the preachers hellbent(no pun intended) on community service and prisoner reform. They'd come down to the cell block with the more violent offenders and ask them one by one to accept Jesus. Before all of that though, churches had seemed like a kind of fairytale place that he'd always heard about, but sure as shit never wandered into. The Alexanders were too busy raising hell to take a timeout for prayer, but Joey remembered Sunday mornings and the church bells that rang way down the block, the girls with ribbons in their hair, and the boys with shiny shoes. He'd thought they were all suckers at the time. Having to go to some stuffy old church while Joey and his sisters got to sit on the sidewalk and eat colorful popsicles until they were sick with hands sticky with melted sugar and sidewalk chalk. Part of him had been a little envious of the kids with the bows and the special Easter clothes, but it'd been a short-lived envy. Before long, Joey had grown up enough to learn that envy was for people too stupid to figure out a way to take what they wanted.
Even that had been a child's naivete, and Joey smiled sad, thinking back on how simply it had all seemed then to a budding criminal inspired by wanting those church Sunday shoes that shined or the hat with the bow for Tess. Only now did Joey understand that he hadn't really given a shit about the hat or the clothes or the churchbells, he'd wanted the church Sunday smiles. He'd wanted the sisters who skipped hand-in-hand and never seemed to cry, the perfect parents that stood in the shade, still in love.
"Where are we?" He asked while sliding into the pew alongside her. His voice echoed off of the walls, betraying the fact that he'd never stepped foot in a church and didn't know about the hushed voices that sanctimony demanded. Never, not once.
She took comfort from the smell of beeswax rubbed into pine, of warm candle-wax and the cool of large, empty buildings with something extra, Sunday service soaked into the walls. When Ella was small, she thought that smell, honey wrapped around fire was the smell of holiness, like you could seek it out and inhale it in. Church had been home, long as Ella had known it. She’d been two and entranced by the voices and the dresses, so many people in the pews who looked like brightly colored birds all singing together. She’d been five, and inconsolable that Max was gone, old enough to count the time between holidays. And she’d been ten, and up there in a robe and singing with the choir, the music so sweet and sharp she could feel her nose burning like she wanted to cry.
She knew this church the way she knew the lines on her own palm and the smell Beth’s head had held when she was small enough to pick up, limp and soft, and cuddle.
“We’re safe,” she said on a soft exhale, watching the candles flicker and burn. She had her fingers still laced in his; they were small and clean and half-hidden by the loose end of her sleeve, she hadn’t noticed. “We’re in church.” Ella said it as simply as if the two were the same, intrinsically mirror images. Church was safe. Church was a retreat. She sat with her heels tucked back beneath the seat and her eyes on the altar, and she smiled, small and quiet. It wasn’t the freedom of the swing but it was almost and Ella had forgotten you could feel the way she did on the swings, any longer.
It'd been a long time since Joey had felt this small. It was like the first time he'd seen the ocean from more than just the boardwalk, the unending water seemed like it was the kind of place where the world could just swallow you up. And it was. He'd thought about all of the shipwrecks and all of the seamonsters and all of the dead things to never be recovered out in the forever blue, and he'd felt small.
He'd felt small when he walked into his cell block in prison white, no longer a man but a last name, a series of numbers, a list of charges, and a grave where some guy's kids put flowers and cursed Joey's name. And Joey wasn't the only one, his new home was full of people like that. Packed like a sardine can full of people that he'd never wanted to be but now and forever was. And the bars closed with heavy clangs every time doors were shut, motorized locks, lights that went out automatically at night, grown men that cried in their sleep while Joey laid awake at night, listening. He'd felt small, but not small enough to slip thru the cracks, not anymore.
Then there'd been the time that he'd made Sam cry. When he'd pushed her in anger, grabbed her, shook her, when he wanted to know so badly why the fuck she'd become the way she had. Over ripened fruit, she bruised easily, and she broke into the kind of hysterics that made him escape to the other side of the room. So fucking small, but not small enough to disappear. Just small enough to not be able to fix it.
The church brought about a different kind of small. It was all wonder, overwhelmed with the possibility of being safe. Ella said it like she knew it down to her pretty soul, and he figured it must be true. She probably prayed all of the time, and some savior probably listened to her, so safety seemed very real. It was her dream, and he trusted her. The church was amazing beauty, just like the curl of skinny fingers in his hand. He ran his thumb over her knuckles where they started to vanish under her sleeve, barely-there like maybe he wasn't supposed to, and maybe he could pretend he didn't if that was the case. "I'm glad I'm here."
The church was before it all began to undo, like her mother’s dropped stitches when she began to fall asleep waiting for the General and Max to come home, the house full of the smell of roast chicken and expectations. The church was before; New York and Coop’s sly-shy smile behind his glasses, the way he’d put her hand in his, in his pocket so they were both warm the same, before hospitals and before sitting at the kitchen table with bills spread out like daisy petals, playing a long, long game of which ones could be delayed before she lost, Beth’s endless, sleepless infanthood in the background.
She hadn’t prayed in years: she’d been too mad at God to want to talk to him at all.
She had prayed desperately, the old familiar prayers and the new ones, words that sat on the end of her tongue like salt, bitter and sharp with her head over her hands, she’d said them in her sleep when Coop lay in the bed and she watched him go in pieces at a time. She hadn’t thought the God of this church - a far off, wondering, placid and kindly God who was worshipped with sweet words and bright music - could take a person as good, as needed as Coop. She didn’t think he took folks who needed to see their little girls learn their faces, their names. She hadn’t believed, and she’d forgotten the church the same day she realized she couldn’t stand by Coop right there at the front.
She hadn’t said anything at all to God during the months she stripped off her clothes and stood in cotton underwear in front of men who were speculative eyes and hands cool from air-conditioning. She’d been mad, solid mad like a fight that sat under the skin, hot and tight, and she’d said desperate things mired in the hopelessness of Beth being gone, the tired resentment dulled down by pain. She hadn’t gone back to God: she’d blamed him, because if she was bad enough to deserve her baby taken away from her, to have her husband leave her, then he was bad enough to let it happen.
God didn’t listen one word to her. If there’d been a savior, he’d listened too far off and too late for her to hear him.
But back here, back where it was still and quiet and she recognized the light through the windows as that far-too-early morning when it was nothing and nobody in the church, maybe here was where you needed to be, to talk where he would listen. His thumb was a warm calloused sweep over her hand, and she looked at him and smiled like memories were recalled; soft and still and small. She let her hand be, and she looked at the candles. “My mother told me you light them for the people who need hope,” she said, “And the people who have gone who hope for you. I never found anywhere like this in New York or Vegas.”
Joey looked at the candles, little halos lit in the darker enclave, rows of them in little glass jars that kept wind or words from gusting their flame out. He thought he'd seen something like them in a movie once, or maybe when he'd been really young. Back before his parents had gotten even more worthless, back before Sam was born and they'd stopped doing anything that he could figure was any good for anybody's damn spirituality. Regardless of what it was, he believed Ella when she said that lighting them meant hope.
"Should we light one?" He asked her with a sideways look, and he was still holding her hand although he didn't seem aware of it anymore, his thumb had stopped making daydream circles on the back of her hand where the skin was thin and pale and lined with soft blue. Joey looked at the candles again with a squint, and the question might have seemed naive. Like a kid who asked if a priest walking down the aisle looking so immaculate, if he was God. Could they light candles? Were people like him allowed to hope anymore? He didn't know.
Ella thought maybe there was some of the boy still there, the one who’d wanted donuts and to skip school, who had towed her along in his wake like an buoy moored to a boat. The boy who had looked like he knew how to laugh was a shadow, but he was there. “We can light one,” she had no money, for the jar beside the candles that asked for donations but her mom had always tossed in a quarter or two extra each time she put money in, ‘so that people who need hope most can take it too’. He didn’t sound like he knew the why or the how but he was tentative the way the Sunday school kids had been when they were small, and she didn’t smile, she was solemn when she nodded that ‘yes’.
The floor squeaked from polishing under her sneakers and the aisle was a mile long in memory, but the candles were the same, dripping little votives and a box of tapers beneath. She picked one out with her fingertips, the long slender taper and she lit it from one of the candles at the very end, and held it a moment, a lick of little flame that curled upward. It was so small, that flicker, and it was real enough to believe in, and she let go his hand long enough to hitch up her sleeve where it belled at her wrist, and to pass him the taper, careful to cup her hand around the flame.
“It’s your hope,” Ella said, her face serious, lit by the flame. “You pick which one. And you think it, your hope.”
"What? No, I don't know how." And he actually looked worried, which for him probably meant he was fucking full-tilt terrified. Like she'd asked him to perform open heart surgery. Even his voice, the alarm that sprung up from her suggestion, it shrank with fright, until the words felt so caught in his tight throat that he had to swallow past them. The votives glittered in little rows all before them. So many hopes, he wondered who lit them all or if many people had come all at once, releasing their dreams that like picture he saw on the tv once, of people letting loose a flock of paper lanterns in the night.
"What if I ruin it?" Again, it was like she'd asked him to do something infinitely more intense than light a little candle. The church was empty and nobody was watching but her, but if any of this was going to work then maybe God had to be watching too. And maybe Joey wasn't supposed to. Maybe he'd just ruin it. His fingers flexed, spurred by the thrumming of his heart that told him to run. His hand was empty of hers now and loneliness felt about right even though Ella was right there, face like serenity on the other side of the taper's flame. He thought she was beautiful and terrifying, just like the unlit votives that waited for him to hope. And he wanted to..
but the heels of his boots dug into the floorboards and took him a step back. "I'm.. sorry," the words cast between them like already giving up. And even that was a sorry for Ella, like the worst part was disappointing her, not burying himself back in the cool soil of a hopeless grave.
Her mouth lilted upward against his fright. It was novel, broad height whittled to bone and sinew bowing to fear and Ella thought maybe he’d never been told you could hope without thinking it would be taken from you, that maybe all those days concrete-closed from the world had taken the knowing away from him. It was momentary, the expectation that fear would flee instead of grow teeth, and she reached for his sleeve a second before his step back took him out of reach, the flame flicker-dancing in her hand, a confused look shuttering in blue eyes.
“Why?” she said, of sorries, of recriminations thin as paper and distance put between them, a trench beyond crossing. Her fingers curled back into her palm, the taper fluttered out, a hiss of smoke curling toward the rafters. She was abruptly, suddenly sad -- and somewhere, in the dark, Ella shifted under blankets and the dream extinguished, as briefly and without warning as it had begun.