Unknowable

The first time David Winslow disappeared, he had been missing for two days before his grief-addled mother found him crammed inside the upstairs bathroom's vanity cupboard.

"DWIGHT! DWIGHT, COME HERE!"

David's father thudded up the stairs, taking them two-at-a-time once he heard his only child's cries join chorus with his wife. He rounded the corner and there they both were: Sarah leaning against the floral wallpaper, their son squirming in her arms, a slant of yellow light spilling out of the bathroom and upon them.

"How on God's green earth...?" Dwight slowed his approach, his brain churning to parse the puzzle of the pair of them.

There was a hole, right there on the breast of David's button-down. Although the blemish was small, it was dark and charred around the edges, as though it had been burned right through the checker pattern. A thin sliver of something brown poked out of his folded sock...a pine needle. The boy still wore his new shoes—Dwight had tied the clean laces in little bows just minutes before David had gone missing. Now, thick mud plastered the white leather. Dark streaks of it had rubbed off onto Sarah's blouse.

Shock set in like a hefty dose of lidocaine. Although Dwight wanted to fling his arms around his child, to kiss his wife's head and hold them both close to his heart, he found instead that his numbed motor skills could only muster a light grazing of fingertips against the boy's damp cheek.

"How, Sarah?"

"He was in the cupboard," Sarah squeaked.

Dwight craned his neck to peer into the bathroom and gawked at the open cabinet. Gone were the cleaning supplies, spare toilet paper, and Sarah's organized stack of colorful plastic bins. Soil and rocks and shrubbery layered the vanity's interior instead, like a neatly staged terrarium, disturbed only by the imprint of their son's small form in the place where he must've been nestled in the dirt.

A shiny beetle flew out of the inexplicable foliage and landed on the opposite wall.

Dwight locked eyes with Sarah. Hers glittered with relief, perhaps even a joyous wonder at the situation, but not a single speck of the horror that was overtaking him like an invasive species.

∞

Dwight never imagined that they would become one of those families with a secret. Since he was a boy he could identify the people who carried hidden things, festering like abscesses beneath tight smiles and carefully tread conversations. They wore plastic auras like perpetual shields from disgrace. Their homes were dense. Speak one wrong word at their dinner tables and the atmosphere in the room would go thicker than gravy.

The tension of secrets was too oppressive for Dwight. He was more inclined to emote a breed of unflappable bluntness that was off-putting and charming in equal measure. An honest man, Sarah had crooned twice in her wedding vows, as if his straightforward character was deliberate altruism rather than a reflexive self-preservation.

She did always have a way of spotting rainbows in a storm.

So Dwight was unsurprised, though more than a bit bothered, when she took to calling David their little miracle. When his disappearances recurred—around each turning of the season, Dwight eventually noted—Sarah's nerves dissipated more each time. "He's off in Eden again," she would sigh, the dreamy glimmer in her eyes marking yet another distance that Dwight could not travel. For while Sarah had convinced herself that their son was off on some holy communion with their maker four times each year, Dwight fretted over unanswered questions and unresolved practicalities. Where did David truly go when he disappeared—and why, even as his language skills developed, did he refuse to tell them? How would they manage this affliction once he was in school? So far, he had only disappeared and reappeared within their own four walls.

What if one day he went and never came back at all?

∞

Ash Wednesday fell the first week in March the year that David turned five. By then, Dwight observed the weather with more acute obsession than a professional meteorologist, and he knew that it was unseasonably warm for a New England March. Bits of persistent green poked warnings out of thinning patches of snow.

"We shouldn't bring him, Sarah," Dwight reiterated for the third time that morning.

"Oh, stop it, would you? It's Ash Wednesday," Sarah emphasized the holiday, remaining transfixed on her own reflection as her fingers worked pink rollers out of her hair, "We can't not go, what might Father Bud think of us? Besides, springtime is weeks away—when has he ever taken a trip to the garden this early in the year?" Dwight flinched at her choice of words, but Sarah carried on, oblivious, "Now go and change into those navy slacks I pressed for you. It's a special occasion."

Well, she was right about it being some type of occasion. Twenty or so minutes into the service, David vanished from the pews. One moment he was leaning against Sarah's arm, straining to keep his eyes open even as his mother admonished him for yawning, and the next there was nothing but vacant air between them.

Dwight felt his face flush with heat and the muscles in his jaw went tense. When he rose from the pew, Sarah tugged at his sleeve and flung a terse look that shouted: don't you dare cause a scene.

He wrenched his arm from her grasp and stormed out of the church.

When the service was over, Sarah found Dwight sitting alone on a bench in the courtyard. She shoved her thumb into a nearby plant and smeared potting soil on his forehead, in the shape of a cross that mirrored the smudge of ashes on her own. "There you go, dear. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Dwight removed his round-frame glasses to wipe specs of fallen dirt from his eyelashes. "Well? Where is he? Did he turn up in a bed of moss on the altar during communion, or crash through a window on the bough of a giant deciduous tree, raining stained glass over the choir?"

"Don't be silly. He's never brought back anything so large as that."

"Why am I the only one who's scared, Sarah?"

"Keep your voice down," his wife sat on the bench beside him, angling herself towards him for discretion. "The Lord is testing our faith, can't you see? I'm not afraid because I trust in His divine plan. Our son is safe. He's always been safe."

"You don't know that—You don't even know where he goes. Why are his clothes sometimes burned? Why is he always so damned starving and tired when he gets back? Does that sound like the grace of God to you?"

Sarah quieted. A few acquainted members of the congregation smiled and waved in their direction, but kept their distance, perhaps noticing the gravity between the couple by the furrow in Dwight's brow, or the way Sarah kneaded white-knuckled fingers together over crossed knees. The weight of Dwight's questions got heavier in the stretch of silence, until eventually they lightened and softened and floated away, unanswered, on the breeze.

"Shall we go inside and wait for him, then?" Sarah gripped her husband's hand.

"Of course."

∞

The sun was setting when David entered the worship room from the rear door behind the apse. He was dragging a black trash bag that was twice his size, and attempting to tuck in the tail of his dress shirt, and trying to fix his mussed hair, and just barely managing not to trip over his own two feet.

"I cleaned up," he announced to his encroaching parents, who took turns inspecting their son and casting furtive glances around at the mostly empty pews.

Dwight pried open the lip of the bag to find that it was filled half-way with branches and dirt. Presented this way, it looked so mundane. They could've been lawn clippings.

"So no one finds out," David whispered, and his mother sobbed.

∞

The older David got, the more his parents adjusted to his silence on the matter of his unique predilection to vanish from thin air and reappear sometime later with clumps of earth in tow.

By the time he was a teenager they barely spoke of his affliction at all, and yet the shared knowledge of it was a looming shadow. Each of them grew more vigilant over their increasingly superficial conversations, until even talk of the changing weather was off-limits by unspoken consensus.

The chasm between them deepened, and their intimacy waned, and the fatigue of navigating the minefield of each other's company exhausted itself so completely that dinners were always served on trays in front of the television, and car speakers blared incessant talk radio, and Sarah put records on every morning until Dwight left for work and David left for school.

Until one day, Dwight looked out the den window and noticed, with a lurch of familiar anxiety, that the tips of the leaves on the sugar maple tree in their front yard were starting to bronze. He decided right then that all of the meaningless noise cushioning their lives had reached a suffocating crescendo.

He got up from his recliner and unplugged the television with dramatic flare.

Sarah's eyes went wide with warning.

"Son, it's time to tell us the truth."

David missed an almost imperceptible beat before responding through a mouthful of buttered brussels sprouts, "I don't think that's a good idea, dad."

At the same time, Sarah protested, "Dwight, please."

Dwight raised his hand before planting it firmly on his hip. "I'm afraid we have no other choice. Can't you see? We hardly know each other anymore."

"You wouldn't believe me..."

At this, Sarah perked. "Well of course we would, dear. We've seen you vanish before our eyes, what is left to doubt?"

Dwight could sense the tide turning in his wife. He knew that after all of this time, she wanted the truth as much as he did. Maybe more.

"You won't like it. It's not something you'll understand."

"Try us," Dwight insisted.

So David finally told them about the dragon.

∞

"So I'm supposed to believe that every time you disappear you go to another world to meet a dragon in, what, some enchanted fairytale forest?" Dwight rubbed at the back of his neck, thinking maybe he lit the furnace too early this year. It was warm. His wife shuddered beside him, having long since conceded her cries of blasphemy to a stream of quiet sobs.

"No. Not at all. Listen to me again, carefully: Our world isn't real. You're not real—none of this is real. I don't go to some enchanted forest, or another world. The forest is the only world, do you understand? And I don't really meet the dragon, so much as I am the dragon... we are the dragon..."

"What you're saying is impossible," Dwight didn't know what to expect, but he hadn't expected this. Sure, David's disappearances were an admittedly abnormal fluke of nature, but the boy always seemed to have his head screwed on tight, regardless.

"It's not, Dad. Put it this way—You're me. And I am you. And we are just... made up stuff. We're a dragon, asleep in a forest, dreaming an infinite dream, and no one knows it but me, and for Christ's sake"—("Language!" his mother rebuked with a quavering voice)—"I wish you wouldn't look at me like that. I wish I never said anything. This already makes me feel so... lonely."

"How could you be lonely, son? You have friends. You have us. You're not alone, that's absurd."

"Dad! We ARE alone, that's why we've made all of this—UGH!" David let out a frustrated growl, and seemed to battle himself for composure. "Just imagine that what I'm saying is true—"

"If what you're saying is true, then what about the burns in your clothes, son? Or all of the—the twigs and the rocks and the bugs. For crying out loud, you brought a butterfly back once! How could the real world just come back with you into this fake one that your mother and I live in—What does your dragon say about that, hm?"

Sarah sniffled and leaned back against the cushions on the loveseat. Her eyes fixed on the ceiling, she began to pray: "Forgive him, father, for he knows not what he says..."

David swept his hands over his hair and clutched onto the top of his head like he was trying to keep it from floating away, "I don’t know how it works! The dragon doesn't speak with words. I just feel how it feels. It's sad and... restless."

"Grant mercy on his lost soul..."

"I think we're waking up, dad. I think the dragon—We, I mean—I think we're tired of the dream—Mom! Stop it, please, I can't think—"

"...I pray that you deliver him salvation, expel these delusions from his mind..."

"It's like the seams of the dream are fraying, and for some reason I’m the one at the end of the thread—"

"...and shine the glorious light of your gospel upon him..."

"But I think we want to keep dreaming—" And perhaps that was the greatest truth of all in David's unknowable secret, for in that moment, he disappeared.

∞

Dwight and Sarah strolled arm-in-arm through their neighborhood park, the babbling of a nearby seasonal creek heralding the start of springtime. A gaggle of children shrieked and chased each other in a game of tag.

Sarah watched them, and as she did so, Dwight could see a pensive fog roll in and cloud her mind.

"Penny for your thoughts," he said.

She squeezed lightly at his bicep. "Does it ever make you sad, Dwight?"

They hadn't had this conversation in a while. But Dwight was never put off by it—quite the contrary, each time Sarah laid bare the innermost workings of her mind to him, he felt nothing but tenderness and gratitude. What a gift it was to truly know someone. He pulled her closer, sheltering her from the nip of the still-crisp air, "A life with you could never make me sad, Sarah."

"But it might've been even better. Richer. More adventurous... If we'd been able to have children," she stopped, considering. "Doesn't it seem as though something is missing? I just sometimes feel... Well, never mind. It's silly."

"Oh, don't stop now."

Sarah chewed on her words before she continued, "I just sometimes feel like I miss something I've never had. Like a person, but I've never met them. Or a place, but I've never been there. Do you know what I mean?"

"Now that's curious. How do you suppose you’ve come to feel so fondly for a place you've never even been?" Dwight chuckled.

"That is the question, isn't it?"