Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash
It’s 5:00 a.m. and I ask my husband if he wants to hear my dream, but he pulls the quilt over his shoulders. I ask my other husband, but he just presses himself against me as if I’d asked a different question. Downstairs, another husband makes a smoothie, and I ask if he wants to hear my dream. It’s still vivid, narrative even, and he says he can’t be late, but there are holes in the dream now (was I a dancer?) and if I don’t tell someone soon, they’ll multiply. I go into the study where another husband is tapping away at his laptop, headphones on, so I back out of the room and head to the garage where a husband is fixing something that’s on the list of things to be fixed. If I don’t say this dream out loud it will disappear, so I start to tell him, something about a race, a trip, but he stops me and asks if it can wait until later, until our list is a little shorter, and I go out to the driveway where a husband is loading the car with suitcases, and I just start shouting part of the dream, what’s left of it, THERE’S A BUS IN A CITY, because for fuck’s sake, it’s almost gone, but another husband honks the horn twice, short, angry blasts, and all the husbands stream out of the house and the garage and the garden, and one comes from over at Tina’s, buttoning up his shirt, a shirt I gave him for his birthday last year, and they pile into the car and drive away and I’m left alone with shards: the color blue, a river, maybe a possum.
Emily Rinkema lives in Vermont. She recently has stories in Milk Candy, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge and Lascaux Prizes for flash fiction. You can follow her on X, BS, or IG @emilyrinkema.
