Slumber

The Story

Slumber

I am dreaming of our old family house, the one we lived in before All That happened and Dad and Brian left me and Mother and we became inseparable the way loss makes you.

In the dream, I am wandering around and looking at all the rooms: the kitchen with its little linoleum table in garish diner colors, the old Frigidaire humming along like a patient drone; the living room with the wood-paneled walls and the tacky mounted taxidermy fish from Dad's evenings at the lake. We'd sit there under the recessed lights and play games, dice clacking across the scarred coffee table.

Upstairs, I stand in the door to the room Brian and I shared, looking at the bunk bed shoved up against the wall, the red bean bag under the window that looks out over the back garden. The wall is marked with crayon just to the right of the gauzy curtains, a swoop of violent black against the white paint, from when we wanted to practice our signatures. Mother was not happy upon finding out.

I travel the hall between here and my parents’ room, searching for the light switch between, when I notice some of the flowered wallpaper is torn, peeling away from humidity. We never had AC, and the summer months would get thick with heat in this house. It was just one more thing that caused her and Dad to fight. I put a hand over the peeling wallpaper, smoothing it back. Then, on impulse, I press the tips of my fingers into the wall beyond and it gives, the damp plaster caving into the hollow space beneath.

My heart is filled now with disquiet, like a winter morning. I don't want to see, but the house begs me to, plying at my wrists, engulfing them like a wet mouth. I take the edges of the hole I've made and spread it wider. A sense of deja vu trickles down my spine.

Your father left and he's not coming back. He took your brother with him.

It was always hard to believe- Mother was always the one so distant, the one who sometimes looked at me and Brian like things she regretted purchasing. Sometimes she looked at me and she wasn't there in her own eyes.

I stop digging now, the plaster falling around me; I see them now. There in the darkness they sleep just like me, their necks crooked back, eyes wide and staring in their cold faces. I know it. I always knew it.

The lock turns in the door downstairs, waking me, and when she comes in, I am standing in the middle of the kitchen. She drops her grocery bags to the floor at the sight of me. Our roles are reversed now. I am the parent, and she is the errant child I caught scribbling on the wall.

"What have you done?" I ask, my voice calm and steady, benevolent like God.

The Problems

I started this little 500-word story in response to a prompt about secrets, and then submitted it around the same time to the 500 Word Shockwave challenge here on Vocal. Very quickly after hitting submit, I had my misgivings about it- so much so that I submitted a second story to the challenge after, one that felt better and more 'complete' (and I'm glad I did! It won runner-up). But this story always felt a little like a dud, and until this challenge, I never really sat down to try and figure out why. 

It started with a premise that just kind of came to me when I sat down to write: this character is having a dream where she's wandering around her old house, and she makes a gruesome discovery through the dream (I never specify in the story but I pictured the main character as a young woman). The discovery being that her brother and father, who split ways years ago, never actually left. Her mother killed them and hid them in the wall before they moved. 

This story hits on a lot of things that tickle my fancy: creepy house imagery, bodies in walls, a secret killer. I am still fond of the idea, and I like parts of the ending I wrote quite a lot, just the language of it, this daughter confronting her mother out of the blue after all these years. However, for the most part, I feel like the execution was kind of a mess. Here's why.

1. Clarity is the first major issue. The unnamed MC makes the discovery in her dream and then immediately confronts her mother. Because she's walking around in the house in her dream, this creates a mess of confusion, at least to me upon reading it again. It sounds almost like she's sleepwalking, opens a wall in her actual current-day house (for real) and then hears her mother enter and wakes up, walking straight from the newly exhumed dead bodies to the kitchen. The wall-opening part was supposed to be happening in the dream, in an older house they no longer live in, but the way I currently have the story this doesn't really come through.  This could be worked on easily enough (ex: she wakes up in her bed, in a different house and stumbles out to the kitchen). However, it didn't feel like the only problem with the piece. 

2. The characters seem made for something longer, which makes trying to cram their whole situation into the 500 words the prompt required a little awkward. The relationship between the mother and the MC is interesting to me, and is something that demands to be expanded on in my head (why did the daughter get spared? What were the mother's motives for offing her husband and son? Questions I don't know the answer to, precisely, but could be interested in figuring out). Except I don't know what a longer story would look like. The narrative would look entirely different and I'm not sure I want to sacrifice the tight shock of the ending.

The other option is to keep the story short, but rewrite to make it feel more complete on its own. This would likely involve expanding it beyond its original 500-word constraints, but would leave a lot of the mystery that I think gives it the eerie feeling I was gunning for, but at the same time give me a little more space to flesh things out. This is what I'm leaning toward as I write this, but I've never been sure enough to take action. 

3. One thing that I don't think comes across how I wanted it to was the fact that the main character might not be as innocent as she seems - and is certainly not as unaware. The title- slumber- and the fact that the story starts with a dream, is meant to trigger thoughts of the subconscious, the way pieces of repressed thought or memory can come floating up to the top of the sleeping mind the way pieces of a wreckage can come dislodged and pop up to the top of a lake one mundane morning (And suddenly a cold case is solved!)

I myself have had some weirdly clarifying or prophetic dreams, and I assume I'm not alone. This is what I wanted to achieve with this main character and her dream. The accuracy of the dream (are her brother and father actually stowed behind the wall in the old house, or is that just the vehicle image for the message- mother killed them?) doesn't matter. What matters is that she is unearthing knowledge she's repressed- and getting that across in the story. How does she know her mother did this? Is it just a strong hunch, a feeling? Did she see something that confirmed it for her and then never confronted her mother until the morning in the story?

While all these are questions that plague me, not all of them have to be answered in the story- but I want them to be asked by the reader, and I don't think it is set up to spur those kind of questions in its current state.

The Solution?

At the end of the day, this is a prime example of a story that was published before it was ready. A lot of the stories I leave for dead are stories I don't feel any kind of connection with, but I think there's a seed of something here I still really want to bring out.

And this is where I turn it to you, the reader. What have I missed here? Do you agree with me on what could be improved - or maybe there's something I've overlooked that you think would make the story work for you. Let me know in the comments - I'd love to hear from you!

Sometimes the biggest problem for us as writers is diagnosing our own problems- we know something isn't quite working, not clicking, but we have a hell of a time figuring out why. And this confusion sometimes only grows worse the more we examine a piece and read it over. We're simply too close to the process, unable to see the forest for the trees. Sometimes the missing piece is simply a fresh set of eyes.