Nightflower Candor

My dog always found them. We went on walks in the forest and he would find them. One after another, here, there, he couldn’t stop finding them. These beautiful, magnificent flowers glowing in the twilight. Then one day my dog stopped finding them.

            We walk in the forest every day and he keeps his nose to the ground but still no flowers. I try to remember their preferred spots. Damp, rocky soil, under branches where sunshine is scarce and unpredictable. It all felt so normal and effortless until they could no longer be found, until they became unfound. That’s when I began questioning my sanity.

            I started lucid dreaming about a year ago and since then life has gotten weird. Dreams and reality used to be separate but now I stay up all night. I sleep all day. I think…

            Memories or imagination?

            My feet drag across my bedroom carpet in a sleepy daze. Consciousness sort of floats in open spaces around but not inside me. Blinking like fireflies. Then I wake in the middle of the woods with the faintest itch of having just missed something.

            I think I see my father. His signature stare under thick brows. Over there, cloaked in moonlight, but nervous like a werewolf who knows the moon will die someday. Does he see me? If he does, he ignores me. I’m not looking where I go.

            A crunch underneath my boot.

My dog sniffs about as I behold the damage. Petals destroyed and all color lost. Roots dead or dying. I drag my sole across the carpet of torn leaves and dried needles as if to scrape away my guilt. My dog whimpers softly but is ignored earnestly.

            Then I see it.

            I kneel to lift the beauty from the floor. This tiny seed shining against the skin of my palm. The whimpering stops. Mine and the dog’s.

            My mother is now standing next to me, I think. The fangs of a vampire shine brightest under a full moon. The blood, always the blood, the thirst and the taking. Like my father, she doesn’t seem to witness me, to find me.

            Perhaps, I’m a little crazy, but this seed…

            Unimportant, discardable, something to be lost and trampled on by centuries of growth or progress or whatever else they will call it, but no, here in my palm. In my possession.

            My dog follows me as the forest darkens with the dipping sun. The seed wants to jump from my hands as if opposing its own domestication. Everything is telling me it belongs in the forest, but our innate tendencies are too great.

            I rest a moment and look at the seed in my palm. It smiles at me and tells me that it believes in me. This terrific feeling of trust and kinship danced from my hands into the rest of my body like a disco. This is almost certainly a dream.

            I grooved on with a buzzing grin. I found it. We found it.

            Then I tripped and lost the seed.

            My dog noses the ground for hours but cannot find it. Nor can I. Perhaps my dog has unknowingly eaten it and now we search for what has already been consumed. Licked chops can only be imagined as some kind of eulogy. I scratched under his ear and tapped him twice on the butt to let him know it was time. Time to go home. Time to wonder why.

            We walk the long way home and it takes as long as it should. We squeak through the front door unnoticed. I slip off my boots and see a little something. A little something so little it can barely be considered there but there it is tangled in a bootlace. I reach for the beauty and the hope and everything else it represents but again find myself back in the forest, dusk creeping in, my dog licking me awake. I hear them.

            I hear the vampires and the werewolves.

            I search the bootlace again but there was no seed. I look and I look, but the material does not materialize. I take off my boots and check my socks. I look and I look, but the seed is once again unfound. I check my jacket, my pants, underwear.

            I search my nakedness until noticing my boots resting on the floor in a peculiar way. The patterns of the soles seem almost infinite like a galaxy or a universe. The quest and the seed. Things that could never be in my palm. A fool…

            I rub my eyes and get a little older.