In the dark of second morning, my son’s fever might be breaking. He stirs the sheets less frantically, breathes easier until, by the glass of his eyes in the dark, I see he is awake and watching me. My son, my son—he is eight years old.

Hey buddy, I say. Good morning. I feel his forehead, back, ask what dreams he had.

I don’t remember, he says, enduring my ministrations. Then, after a moment: What about you? Did you have any dreams, Dad?

Yeah. Yes, I say, actually. Two. And you were in both.

Really?

I rearrange his blankets. The steam of our breath in the cold, dark morning.

Tell me, he says.

Well, I say.

I

In the first, we’re walking through the forest: you, your baby sister, and me. You’ve got a bucket in your hand that your sister really wants to help carry, to be like you, so you hold it where she can reach it as you walk down the trail. Because you are a good brother, I say.

Wrens and swallows alight on twigs as we walk and a barn owl watches from a tree, but none make a sound. It is early in the morning, before the birds begin to sing, a special time in my dream when, for a little while every day, animals can talk to people. The first animal to do so is a racoon, suddenly present and closer than expected, in the manner of raccoons. And just from the look of him, it’s clear he’s been up all night.

“You don’t know where you’re headed, do you?” he says. And I realize I don’t, nor can I say from where we’ve come, nor even how long we’ve been walking. And so I pause, on the edge of realizing I am dreaming. But you and your sister keep going.

“We’ve got to get this promise to my mom,” you tell the raccoon, indicating the bucket and the something inside it.

The raccoon eyes me, expression between concerned and accusatory: do they know? have you really given them a promise?

So I look inside the bucket, to see what we’re talking about here. And I see that, in my dream, the “promise” in question is a fish made of pure light, swimming idly in the bucket full of creek water. It fairly glows upon our faces.

“We’ve got to hurry,” you say, “it won’t live long like this.” And your sister nods in serious agreement, little legs fast-walking to keep pace with yours. “Promises,” you say, “are very fragile these days. And there aren’t that many left.”

At which the raccoon nods, a little sadly, knowing how too-late it already is, and that it would be impolite to say so.

II

I check to see if he’s still awake before continuing. His eyes reopen at my touch, concerned as the raccoon’s. I begin, then stop almost at once, remembering how it starts.

The second dream, I say, also takes place in a forest, but it’s . . . scarier.

Like a nightmare?

Well . . . kind of. It starts with a car accident, on a curvy road up in the hills. And, in the dream, I feel extra bad, because I know the accident is my fault. But, instead of staying and trying to help, I run away into the woods. Voices call from the crash but I ignore them. I don’t look back. I just run.

The forest is cold and rainy, and running is difficult, like in a dream. I realize my arm is broken. It doesn’t hurt and actually feels numb, but it’s clearly bent and swinging in the wrong place, and so I take off my sweatshirt and tie the sleeves around my neck to make a sling to hold my numb and broken arm, and I keep running,

I keep running until I see an orange window light through the trees that I follow to a house with smoke in the chimney. I approach the door but, before I can decide about knocking, it opens and an old woman emerges, beautiful like your grandma, and like your mom too, I guess. She has these big galoshes on, I remember, and pointed, searching ears. Standing there in the door, she clearly sees me, and I come up to her like a sorry dog, wet, sling-arm broken. I see the fire in the hearth behind her, sniff the air.

Her face is serious. “Come,” she says, “your arm needs fixing.” Inside, other injured animals wait to heal. And I long to join them, but I hesitate, because I’m scared. And so, in the dream, I kind of just stand there, on the threshold in the rain. For a long time.

What were you scared of? my son asks, eventually.

I don’t know. I think, in my dream, I was scared to tell her about the car accident.

Through the dark, I feel him thinking about this, thinking for a while. And I realize I am as scared now as I was in the dream, scared and worried that he has already apprehended the part that I have left out: that he and his sister had been in the car with me when I crashed, and that I had abandoned them, badly injured both, and that theirs were the voices calling me from which I fled. Why on earth had I so thoughtlessly offered this dream?

An explosion a little ways off shakes dust from the ceiling and we both tense. They’ve started earlier these last few days, getting closer.

In my dream, I’d worried that the old woman could see my crime clear upon me, the intuition of old women in galoshes as sharp and merciless as that of raccoons in the early morning and sick children who watch their fathers lying in the dark at their bedside. I feel my son’s head, unable to say if he is cooler. He takes and holds my hand, squeezes.

The medicine is all gone and there is no more. If he recovers now, it will be something he does on his own.

Two Dreams by Derrick Martin-Campbell

Derrick Martin-Campbell is a writer from Portland, OR. His stories have appeared in Joyland, Cold Signal Magazine, and Apocalypse Confidential, among other fine places. Read more of his writing here: https://linktr.ee/derrickmartincampbell

Published October 15 2025