Crumpled Paper

They say you never see a stranger’s face in your dreams. That every face you see in your dreams is someone stored in your subconscious. The woman at the grocery store sniffing the tomatoes last week, the kindly old man behind the counter who snuck you a free cookie at the bakery when you were five, the guy dancing in the background for three quarters of a second in a minor scene of your favorite movie.

Anna believed all this, and yet.

She didn’t start by seeing the stranger in her dreams. Not, really. She first saw him inside her breakfast. Two eggs, three links of turkey sausage, assorted fruit, and an English muffin. She put her plate down, pulled down a chair, and her plate smiled back at her.

It was just breakfast, of course, a silly face. Nothing more than that. Eggs for eyes, sausage for a smile, a little blueberry nose.

Anna took a bite of her muffin, butter dripped down her chin.

Did the egg wink?

She dipped her muffin in the yolk.

She saw him again on the bus. On the side of the bus, a dent, a dent that looked just like a little face. It had a chin, little lips, but the eyes were sunken and hollow.

It gave Anna the creeps. She thought about that face, with the sunken eyes, hollow. She liked eyes. When she looked into someone’s eyes, she could tell what kind of person they were immediately.

“I know it sounds cheesy, but I do believe that eyes are the window to the soul,” Anna’s dating profile once said right underneath a photo of her where a beam of light from the window highlighted the gold in her hazel eyes.

She saw him in the curves of her ice cream cone. She saw him in a darkening storm cloud. She saw him in the patterns of the carpet, the woodgrain. Always slightly out of focus, malformed, twisted and eyeless. She saw him in the steam of her shower. She saw him in the stubble on her leg. She saw him on the pillow before bed.

He was a stranger every time. He was unreal; almost the idea of a face rather than a real person at all.

The first time Anna saw him in her dream she had expected more, but there he was, a malformed twist of tree bark on an old oak tree. Anna brushed her dream hands through the crevices of the old tree and wondered who the face could be.

The face smiled.

Anna woke up.

She stopped seeing the face in real life. It only came to her in her dreams: making appearances in the wallpaper of her childhood bedroom, on the tip of an airplane while trying not to be late for a long overdue vacation, in the coffee she spills during a vital presentation at work.

He’s a half dried flower.

He’s a shadow swaying in the breeze.

He’s distorted sidewalk art.

She sits, alone in the park, and she throws bread from an unending bag of bread to a swarm of ducks. She breaks off little bits at a time and throws them to the ducks that look the hungriest. The bread refills. She wonders why she hasn’t seen the man yet. She wonders if this bread is duck friendly, she would never be irresponsible. She breaks off more and throws to the ducks. The ducks are always so hungry.

In the distance a man walks toward Anna. He approaches slowly. Anna feeds the ducks.

The man stops right in front of Anna,

Crumpled paper.

“Hello,” said the man.

Anna looks him in the eyes.

Anna woke up.

“Hey, honey, honey, are you okay?” asks Anna’s husband. He sits up, rubbing his eye’s with one hand while trying to comfort her with the other.

“I had the dream again, with the man, but this time I saw his eyes. I saw,” but Anna stopped.

“What did you see, sweetheart?” said the man.

“Who are you?” said Anna.

“Baby, it’s me,” said her husband.

“No, no. You look like him and you sound like him, but you’re not my husband. His eyes. I know his eyes. Those are not his eyes. You are not my husband.”

"Mommy," said a child at the foot of the bed.

"No, not you too," said Anna.

The End