The Dream Where the Chickens Wouldn’t Look at Me

The Dream Where the Chickens Wouldn’t Look at Me

The first thing I noticed was that the chickens were facing the wrong way.

All of them.

Twelve hens, one suspicious rooster, and a bantam who had never respected anyone’s boundaries in her life, stood in a neat row outside my therapy room window with their backs turned to the house.

That was not normal.

Chickens are not known for their discipline. They scatter, scratch, argue, panic at leaves, and act like the sky falling is both inevitable and overdue. But these ones stood still as little feathered statues, tails to the glass, heads pointed toward the paddock.

Not clucking.

Not pecking.

Not blinking.

Just watching something I could not see.

I was inside my therapy room, sitting in my old armchair with the green blanket over my knees, although I had no memory of sitting down. The lamp beside me was on, but the room had that peculiar dimness of a stormy afternoon, the kind where the light presses against the windows but refuses to come in.

Rain tapped at the tin roof.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Then stopped.

That was the second thing I noticed.

Rain does not stop all at once. Not properly. Not in the country. It fades, shifts, hesitates, tries again. But this rain cut off like someone had turned a tap.

The silence left behind had weight.

I looked at the clock on the wall.

It said 2:17.

I blinked.

It said 2:17.

I looked away, then back.

Still 2:17.

“That’s rude,” I said, because speaking nonsense into frightening situations has always been one of my more reliable coping strategies.

From the corner of the room came the sound of a biscuit tin lid being lifted.

I froze.

The Arnott’s tin sat on the little table beside the tea tray. The one with the parrot on it. The one that had belonged to someone’s grandmother, or possibly several grandmothers, judging by the emotional authority it carried.

The lid lifted itself slowly.

A pale hand came out.

Not a whole person.

Just a hand.

Long fingers, too many knuckles, nails as clean and white as boiled rice.

It reached into the tin and took a Monte Carlo.

Now, I am not a violent person by nature. I believe in communication. I believe in boundaries. I believe most things can be improved by a cup of tea and a properly held silence.

But there are rules.

You do not come into my therapy room uninvited.

You do not make the chickens nervous.

And you absolutely do not steal the good biscuits.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The hand stopped.

The fingers curled around the Monte Carlo.

The wrist twisted slowly toward me, although there was no arm attached to it beyond the rim of the tin.

From inside the tin, a voice whispered, “You forgot the intake form.”

I stared at it.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“I absolutely did not.”

“You forgot the question.”

“What question?”

The hand placed the biscuit carefully on the table.

Then the tin lid snapped shut.

Outside, all twelve chickens turned their heads at once.

Not their bodies.

Just their heads.

They looked at me over their backs, their eyes like black beads pushed into wet clay.

I stood up.

The room stretched.

Not quickly. Not like in a movie. More like a tired old hallway sighing and deciding it could be longer if it wanted to be. The bookshelf slid away from me. The door drifted backward. The rug lengthened beneath my feet, its pattern crawling into new shapes.

The therapy room became a corridor.

The corridor became a waiting room.

The waiting room became a place I did not recognise but somehow knew I had always been avoiding.

There were chairs lined up along both walls. Every chair had a person in it, though none of them had faces. They sat with handbags in their laps, work boots planted on the floor, children’s backpacks at their feet, tissues clutched in one hand.

The air smelled of wet wool, dog fur, antiseptic, and burnt toast.

A clipboard sat on my chair.

At the top of the page, in handwriting I recognised but did not want to, were the words:

REASON FOR ATTENDING: SHE DREAMS ABOUT YOU.

Underneath was a single question.

When did you first realise the house was awake?

I tried to put the clipboard down, but my fingers would not open.

The faceless people turned toward me.

I could feel them looking, even without eyes.

A woman with no mouth lifted her hand and pointed down the corridor.

At the far end stood a door I had never seen before.

It was painted yellow, cheerful as a child’s bedroom, except something had scratched deep grooves through the paint from the other side.

Above it hung a little wooden sign.

SESSION IN PROGRESS. DO NOT INTERRUPT UNLESS BLEEDING OR DEAD.

“That’s mine,” I said, though I did not know why.

The faceless people nodded.

The corridor lights flickered.

From behind the yellow door came a sound I knew.

A kettle boiling.

Then a spoon stirring.

Then someone laughing softly.

My heart climbed into my throat and sat there like a fat possum.

I walked toward the door because nightmares are unfair like that. You can be full of sensible objections and still find your feet carrying you directly into the worst idea available.

The closer I got, the more the corridor changed.

The walls pulsed faintly under the peeling paint. Not breathing, exactly. More like remembering how to breathe. Framed certificates appeared along the walls, but the names were wrong.

Diploma of Listening to Things Under the Floorboards.

Bachelor of Not Looking Behind You.

Master of Saying You’re Fine Until Your Bones Ring.

Fellow of the Society for Women Who Keep Going.

JP, Qualified to Witness Her Own Disappearance.

“Very funny,” I said, because it was either that or scream.

The yellow door opened before I touched it.

Inside was my therapy room again.

Almost.

The chairs were where they should be. The lamp glowed warmly. The green blanket lay folded over the armchair. The biscuit tin sat closed on the table. A cup of tea steamed beside it.

But the windows were wrong.

Instead of looking out onto my yard, they looked into rooms.

Other rooms.

A child’s bedroom with toys lined up too neatly.

A hospital room where the sheets moved though no one lay beneath them.

A kitchen where every cupboard door opened and closed by itself.

A skating rink with no music playing, only the sound of wheels circling and circling in the dark.

A long road at night, headlights stretching into rain.

A paddock full of animals standing perfectly still, all of them staring at the house.

In the client chair sat a woman with a paper bag over her head.

Not a grocery bag. Not a neat little lunch bag. A brown paper bag like something from an old butcher’s shop, tied loosely around her neck with string.

Two eye holes had been cut into it.

Through them, I could see nothing.

She had her hands folded in her lap.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I didn’t book you in.”

“You always say that.”

“I usually mean it.”

She tilted her head.

“Do you know why people have nightmares?”

“I have some theories.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

The kettle whistled from nowhere.

I looked at the tea tray. The teapot rocked gently, though no one touched it.

The woman in the paper bag leaned forward.

“Nightmares are not stories,” she whispered. “They are places.”

The lights dimmed.

The room seemed to lean closer.

“Places?” I said.

She nodded.

“Some people visit. Some people live there. Some people build houses there and call it coping.”

The green blanket slid off the chair.

Underneath it, the cushion was stained dark.

I stepped back.

The woman laughed, but the sound came from the biscuit tin.

Outside the window that showed the skating rink, a young girl rolled past in circles. Around and around. Her hair streamed behind her. Her face was turned away.

The rink lights flickered.

For a second, the girl’s shadow kept skating after she stopped.

Then she looked toward me.

I knew I should not see her face.

Dreams have rules. Not written ones, not logical ones, but rules your body knows before your mind does.

I turned away.

Too late.

The girl had no face.

Only a smooth blankness where expression should have been.

Then the bag-headed woman said, “She woke up here too.”

The therapy room door slammed shut behind me.

The chickens screamed.

Not clucked.

Screamed.

Every feathered throat outside opened at once, and the sound that came out was human enough to break something in me.

I ran to the door and grabbed the handle.

It was hot.

I pulled anyway.

The door opened into my hallway at home.

Thank God, I thought, and stepped through.

Except it was not my hallway.

It was longer.

Darker.

The walls were hung with photographs I did not own. In every frame, I stood somewhere in the background: near a river, outside a school, beside a hospital bed, in a supermarket aisle, under a streetlight, at a funeral, in a room full of people who did not seem to know I was there.

In one photograph, I was asleep.

In another, I was standing beside myself.

The carpet squelched under my feet.

I looked down.

It was wet with tea.

A trail of it ran along the hallway, amber and steaming, leading to a half-open door at the end.

Behind me, something scratched from inside the walls.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

The rain had come back, but now it was raining indoors.

Tea dripped from the ceiling.

I limped forward, because in dreams your body often remembers every ache you spend the day pretending isn’t there. My legs were heavy. My vision shimmered at the edges. The hall stretched and stretched.

The half-open door whispered.

Not words.

My name.

Not loudly.

Worse.

Fondly.

I pushed it open.

Inside was a bedroom I recognised from childhood and did not recognise at all.

My old bed sat against one wall, covered in a blanket I had forgotten existed. The room smelled of dust, talcum powder, damp curtains, and something sweet gone rotten.

At the foot of the bed sat a dog.

A beautiful old dog with clouded eyes and a grey muzzle.

He wagged his tail once.

My chest hurt.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said.

The dog stood and walked toward me.

Behind him came another animal. Then another.

Dogs, cats, birds, a horse with mud on her legs, a fox, a wallaby, chickens, creatures I had loved, creatures I had lost, creatures I had never met but somehow missed.

They filled the room silently.

Every one of them watched the wardrobe.

The wardrobe door was open a crack.

From inside came a thin, patient breathing.

The dog pressed his head into my hand.

Then all the animals backed away.

“No,” I said.

The wardrobe door opened.

Inside was darkness.

Not empty darkness.

Occupied darkness.

The kind that has been standing there for years, waiting for you to be brave enough or tired enough to look at it.

A voice came from the wardrobe.

“You forgot the intake form.”

I backed up until my legs hit the bed.

The mattress behind me dipped.

Someone was sitting there.

I turned.

The paper-bag woman sat on the bed, but the bag was gone.

Where her face should have been was my own.

Not exactly.

Younger. Older. Exhausted. Smiling too hard. Eyes full of all the things people say they are fine about.

“You need to wake up,” she said.

“I’m trying.”

“No,” she said. “You need to wake up somewhere else.”

The wardrobe breathed in.

The room tilted.

All the animals opened their mouths, but instead of sound, tea poured out. It flooded across the floor, hot around my ankles. The bed floated. The photographs on the wall melted. The house groaned, deep and wounded, like timber remembering it had once been trees.

The thing in the wardrobe stepped forward.

I did not see its face.

I saw what it carried.

A biscuit tin.

The Arnott’s tin with the parrot.

It held it out to me with two white hands.

I knew, with the perfect stupid certainty of dreams, that if I opened the tin I would find the thing I had been avoiding my whole life.

Not a monster.

Not a memory.

A question.

The question.

The one from the clipboard.

When did you first realise the house was awake?

The tea rose to my knees.

The dog barked once.

The chickens outside the dream screamed again.

The thing shook the tin.

Open it, the sound said.

Open it, open it, open it.

So I did what any sensible woman trapped in a nightmare therapy house full of faceless clients, screaming chickens, emotional furniture, and a wardrobe full of unresolved dread would do.

I threw the biscuit tin at its head.

The tin hit with a magnificent clang.

The lid flew off.

Monte Carlos exploded everywhere.

The thing in the wardrobe staggered backward, offended beyond measure.

“Boundaries,” I shouted, and grabbed the teapot.

I flung the tea at the darkness.

The house screamed.

The animals bolted.

The paper-bag woman laughed with my mouth.

The floor vanished.

I fell.

Down past the therapy room.

Down past the corridor.

Down past the waiting room of faceless people.

Down past the skating rink and the dark road and the paddock full of watching animals.

Down through rain that smelled like tea and tea that fell like rain.

I fell until I hit my own body with a gasp.

I woke up.

For one glorious second, I thought I was home in bed.

Then I felt grass under my cheek.

Cold.

Wet.

Real.

I opened my eyes.

The sky above me was grey with early morning.

My dressing gown was soaked through.

My hands were muddy.

A Monte Carlo biscuit lay broken beside my face.

I pushed myself up slowly.

I was outside.

Not just outside.

I was in the chicken yard.

All twelve hens stood in a neat row along the fence.

Their backs were turned to me.

The rooster stood at the gate, watching the paddock.

No one clucked.

No one moved.

The bantam, who had never respected a boundary in her life, stepped toward me and dropped something at my knees.

A brown paper bag.

Two eye holes cut into it.

From the house behind me came the sound of the kettle boiling.

Then the biscuit tin lid lifted.

And from inside the therapy room, something whispered gently,

“Your 2:17 appointment is here.”

The Elephant shifted it's weight, and closed it's eyes.