I had this dream.

The reality was: I lived in my mom's basement. I moved back in after failing to make friends with my roommates. So I decided to go back to school. Life hadn't gone as I had planned it. And here I was....

I was sleeping on the black metal futon I had in mom's basement. The thing always creaked and squealed every time you moved, like it was a ship being lashed by waves. If you moved a leg, it would squeal and creak against you. So it was no surprise that I woke up in the midlle of the night.

I was tired; I could barely open my eyes. So I lay there, waiting for the futon to stop creaking, and I stayed as still as possible. But there was another sound in the basement.

Scurrying, like rats in the walls. Cats long claws across hardwood floors. Fwoosh Fwoosh Fwoosh. A bundle of scraping.

And then there was the pattering across my carpet. The rats had gotten out of the walls and into the house.

I'm awake now, eyes shut, but brimming against their lids.

The scampering across the carpet continues. The it stops at the stairs. In this short silence, I am ready to see the rat. I'll grab my little league bat from the basement hallway -

But then there's another scampering, from the same place that the other started, moving across the room. I flick my eyes open slightly.

It's not a rat. With my eyes open halfway in the darkness, but seeing perfectly, I saw a little girl's feet run across my room.

I was too afraid to open my eyes again. That was too weird. It was a waking dream. That's all. God! It's too much. Always strange dreams. I kept my eyes closed, and let them settle. I was tired.

"Hey. Hey you!"

I opened my eyes to where the girl had run by before. There was nothing there.

I turned over, relieved. I looked up, to the ceiling. I caught them out of the corner of my eye.

The girl stood behind the metal rails of the futon, smiling, and looking down at me. The boy was on her left, also looking nice.

They girl wore, now that I think about it, her wedding clothes (though she could have been only thirteen, at the most.) The boy wore his funeral clothes: A white shirt under a black vest. Black pants.

They both had brown hair. Hers was long, with curls at the end. His haircut was done with a bowl: It was neatly cut; I knew that his mother's fingers had been light through the scissors: careful. The scissors scraped lightly against the blue bowl as she cut the thick strands from around his head.

They looked at me softly.

She said, "I know that you've seen us. But it's okay. If you go back to sleep, We'll tell you a secret in your dream."

She smiled at me sweetly, and I turned over into my two crushed pillows, ready to sleep.

In my dream I saw the girl and boy briefly. They motioned to me through regions of black and pink azure purple clouds.

They dissapeared from my dream. And then the girl began to narrate it for me. She explained the fact that I was sitting by the sea, in my own future, She explained the thoughts that I was having, but I could not make sense of what she was saying.

(On the thoughts that I was having and her trying to explain them to me:

It was like trying to understand the thoughts of someone new in your life, without ever having spoken to that person before.

If you met this person, You would make jokes about the secrets that you share together and you would be completely confused: You think you have experiences that you know didn't happen yet, and you can't remember thoughts you know were only going to be had in the future.)

But then she would lead me, like a caretaker, inot different regions of my dream. Until we fially landed on the door.

And she said open it. Which I did.

The room was black and white. The most important thing was the day calendar on the wall. Cary Grant paused in his embrace and looked up. The pages of the calendar flipped off, like in an old movie. Day after day flipped by, dissolving, one after another, into each other. Then, the calendar's pages began to move even more slowly, and began to settle into their final resting place, past May 15th, and May Thirtieth, past June 1st and June 12th in a flurry, and finally, resting, at June 24th.

And I looked at it, knowing that Cary was oin the middle of a kiss.

"And, then," the little girl said to me, "You will become one of us!"