paint stuck to me, covering my skin. I screamed as the chips crept over my arms, my legs, my throat and face. Only my eyes remained. I could see the dream world caving in on me, but I could not escape. Something or someone was holding me, holding my breath. It forced my mouth open, forcing me to swallow. I tried to swing and fight but my arms felt heavy, weighed down by the rainbow tiles that covered my flesh. Neither asleep nor fully conscious, I fought between worlds. I couldn’t stop seeing. A mosaic mummy, I scratched and clawed and screamed myself awake. The skin on my throat, my arms, even my belly were in tatters.
I cried for my mother but it was too late.
The night the Sight came to me, the night it ripped my flesh into cruel tattoos, Mama died. I never forgave the Sight for taking my mama away from me.
Aunt Dissy claimed it was a heart attack. “Yo’ mama has always been weak.” She covered the mirrors and dressed my wounds with raw honey, forced me to drink a bitter tea. As I swallowed the peppery spice, she refused to let me see her. She wrapped my tattered body in cloths and locked me in my room. But it didn’t matter. I already knew the look of terror on Mama’s face. As the Sight’s fire crept over my body, burned through my shredded skin, I let the pain take over, allowing it to numb the pain of me being left behind.
I never got a chance to tell Mama what I saw in my dream. Every night I waited for her, whispered her name as I tried to fight sleep, but Mama never came. Only Aunt Dissy. And the others. When the oldest came to me, the very first Dissy, I recognized her as if she had always been there, hovering in my room. She floated in the air above me, the look in her eyes like two open wounds. Her body was covered in what I thought at first to be tattoos. But she was riven in cuts and runes. Even her blue-black face. The others gathered around her, rubbed ashes into the wounds. They covered her with a dark stained robe and gently braided her hair, dabbed petals from bright flowers on her unblinking eyes.
As they worked, I recognized them from the portraits that filled the walls in all the rooms of Mama’s house. The woman with the regal black bun and the high, lacy white collar that covered her neck, the Dissy in the long skirts, with bright ribbons that hung down to her knees. The other dressed in sack cloth, her head covered in a handkerchief. Still another dressed in a cloche hat, sporting glossy marcel waves and a fur-trimmed coat, wrapped around her glorious figure. I saw another Dissy wearing what might have been a lab coat. She puzzled me. I couldn’t tell if she was a scientist or held court in someone’s kitchen. All of them Dissys, the infamous line of women in our family, women whose minds wandered in the realm of the spirits, returned with the answers in their dreams. And from what I could tell, their stern faces staring back at me from heavy frames along the mirrorless wall, none of them had been full of cheer. Ever.
So many Dissys. And still others came, from times I could not recognize. They showed me things I didn’t understand, led me to places past fear. And if I refused to sleep, they would sing in the wind. They would whisper in the rain. They would linger in the shadows, the walls of my house shaking, humming, hissing until I slept, until I wove their signs into stories, some I whispered to Aunt Dissy, some I kept to myself. And when I refused them too long, the dark circles under my eyes like black half-moons, they would carve the dreams into my skin. Signs and symbols haunted me, a bloody warning in the light of day.
I wore long sleeves for years. The others teased me, said I was sanctified. I never kept up with fashion, for fear that one of the guidance counselors would think I was a cutter, for fear that CPS might take me away. I covered myself until women in ink were as common as night and day, and then I set the scars free.
For most, dreaming marks the end of labor, a time for rest, reflection. For me, it marks when my labors begin.
My dreams held the fates of people I had not met, their lives netted with my own. And no matter what I did years later to try to change my ‘luck,’ my fate, what Aunt Dissy said was turning out to be true. She’d lived longer than nature allows, while my own mama had died fairly young. Aunt Dissy had seen more dreams than any single mind should ever have. Her body held the story, just like mine. And at the rate I was going, it looked like I too would carry her burden, the weight of the scars, the weight of years.
Longer than the richest, deeper than the sweetest love, she’d said.
But what’s the point in living long if you’re broke and lonely and all the dreams you hold are for everyone but you?
“Hey Slim.” I jerk my chin up in the obligatory greeting and watch Mrs. Medina’s green beanpole of a grandson bebop his way down the street. He has gotten to the age where he thinks he’s grown. He has three long hairs on his top lip he calls a mustache and some knobby strands on his chin he calls a beard. He believes he is a man now and can make a play for me or any woman he sees. If he sees even the hint of a curve, no matter how old that curve is, he’s practicing on you. It’s almost cute. He has grown tall and strong and brown over this Indian summer, but the baby, the boy straining underneath the skin of the man, is all up in his face. I hear Katherine’s little knock-kneed girls giggle as he struts by. His long arm waves as he gives them his back. Still wearing pigtails and bright bobos, they are too young to be kee-keeing in the manboy’s face, but it’s summer, such as it is, the ice cream man hasn’t crawled by yet, and young hearts are for flirting, for loving, if nothing else. Or so I am told.
I stand in the shade of the fire escape, breathe in the scent of spices and my struggle herbs as the manboy disappears around a corner, down the brownstoned street. Aunt Dissy had the gift of green. Me, a different story. My rosemary looks dry, the peppermint and basil wilted, and the yarrow won’t bloom. With my back to the kitchen, I can feel the spirits pulling the huge sky over me. The air feels heavy, humid with the weight of rain. Sheltered from the wind, my skin feels like ripe fruit about to burst. I haven’t slept for nearly two days. A dry spell. Haven’t had dream the first. Aunt Dissy’s book sits on the kitchen table, atop its golden stand, its pages closed, judging me.
A lone black sock from the rough and tumblers upstairs just barely misses my head. That couple is always fighting. Everyone on the block already knows how that dream ends. I watch the sock sail down to the dirty street below, like a fuzzy feather, a sign or a warning. It falls in slow motion, a sign surely, but I don’t know what it means. It’s too early in the day and I can’t tell which. The inside of my head itches. My eyes probably look like teabags. I’m afraid to look. In my mind I am two thousand miles away. My Sight is shaded up from the hot sun. Like a rainbow-tailed serpent, it won’t budge until it’s cool.
I close my eyes. Right now I don’t want to see anything, don’t want to hear, don’t even want to feel. But I know he is standing outside the door before the bell rings.
“Come, sit down,” I tell him and wave at the piano stool set up before my table. He sits as if the weight of his burdens has just sat down on the stool with him. His face and his thin shoulders worn down with worry, the remnants of his dreams linger in the wrinkles of a loose shirt that is too big for him. The man looks not much older than me, but I’m a Dissy—got more years than the stories in my skin can tell. I don’t offer him a drink or a cool glass of water, don’t want him to get too comfortable here. The hard, backless stool is perfect, uncomfortable by design. When I had that old cushy armchair, fools asked me questions late into the night. The frightened and the lonely. The vengeful and the resigned. My head hurt, my eyes stung, and my mind was weary with their dreams. I couldn’t get them out of that seat.
You don’t get what you want because you want it. The waxy skin of my palm, the faded scars, remnants of a jagged river, was proof that not everything is meant for you. No, not love or riches, health or success. With Aunt Dissy’s words in mind, I enjoyed the comforts of flesh, the mysteries of skin. Pleasure came easy because I never expected more. While others gnashed their teeth
