|
The Dream by Stella Pappas He tells me I’m pregnant thirty days after our wedding. His yiayia told him so, forty days after her soul’s last day on earth. She tells him to take good care of me. She tells him I am the mother of generations to come. She tells him we will have three children, two boys and a girl She shows him their photo, the foreground sharp, our first child, a son, the background increasingly blurry revealing our second son and then our daughter, roots of generations multiplying, spreading under their feet. I am in disbelief, just a dream, I say. Two weeks later, the fishmarket’s whiffs and tangs of dried, salted cod, stacked stiff in their wooden crate, quahogs and cherrystones and littlenecks, blue-black mussels with beardy attachments, silvery mackerel, bluefish, flat flounder, rosy swordfish half moons edged in rough darkness, translucent scales and tangled guts, fishmonger boots and aprons and sullied sawdusted floors, dredges up, hauls up from my womb’s watery depth, a drowning, enveloping wave of nausea, a desperate, gulping need, a panic for fresh air, a confirmation of prophetic dream stronger than denial. Thirty-seven years later, after a harrowing morning of gasping for air and nurses working with confident, skilled patience, clearing obstructed airways, bloody matter streaming like seaweed caught on a line, my husband’s energy and breath restored and death still hours away, he smiles, assembles our children at the end of his hospital bed, our daughter taking her customary place between her brothers. No, no, he tells her. Go to the end. He tells one son to stand to the left of the oldest, but one step behind and our daughter to the left of him, one step behind with the proud, careful eye of a fisherman arranging his morning’s catch. They take their places with quizzical eyes, willing to indulge. All smiling back at him, all in sharp detail. There it is, he says, My dream come true. |
|
