Dreams from the Mangrove Forest

One night this winter, I had a bad dream. I dreamt that I had made a bet with my brother, and lost. My penance was death by knife, and I accepted it like one accepts a traffic ticket or a long-expected eviction notice. In lieu of handing over a fistful of sweaty bills, the price for this lost wager was a brief tango with the pointy end of a knife, and my life.

In bed afterwards, I didn’t dare sleep again, knowing that the foul darkness of this dream’s rotting memory could only burn away with the light of morning. All there was to do was lie still and stay awake until the sunrise. As the appointed moment drew near, I raced onto the balcony, heaved open the storm shutters, sticky with salt air, and strained my eyes in the thick morning haze, searching for that faint orange glow above the ocean’s horizon that gives away the sun’s secret hiding place.

I watched as the sun tore itself limb by limb from the water at the world’s edge and rose, the caviar-dotted yolk of a quail’s egg crowning towards the sky as if pulled by an invisible fishing line, up and over as it seeped towards another nightfall.

I realized that I was holding my breath, as I sometimes do. So I opened my mouth, licked the salt from my lips and inhaled, trying not to forget that the sun wasn’t crawling out of the ocean into the sky, but rather that we are spinning so fast that our feet are stuck firmly to the earth and the sun has always been exactly there.