THE SCREAM

Emma Strawberry was doing time at the Northwoods Facility for Women. It wasn’t a prison, it was a place to relax, a place to excuse yourself from the world, a place to ask for permission. Everything had fallen apart and she was doing time. It’s what happens when you fail at life, she joked to herself, a penalty.

She killed time, took the attitude of someone serving a life sentence. Kill your job, kill your relationships, go to prison, keep on killing, kill time. What were they going to do, kill her?

From her room on the third floor, she looked down, across the field, through the trees and over the fence to the field opposite the grounds. She stared down at the scarecrow there, stunned, fascinated. She never knew that time could take the form of a man, even if it was just a stuffed man. The scarecrow was time itself, leaning frozen against the breeze, and it was screaming.

She looked over at her clock.

When the screaming stopped, a man’s voice broadcast in her head, ‘official time of death 2317 hours.’

***

“I saw something strange a couple nights ago,” Emma said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” her brother Eddy said.

Eddy suffered from an affliction most people have, an irrational fear of the mentally ill, as though what fed on emotions and devoured minds was a communicable thing.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve got something to tell you, and I know now’s probably not the best time --”

“Then it can wait,” she said, rushing out of her room, “come on.”

Eddy winced and picked up his coat, followed her slowly down the hall. She was practically running.

***

They were on the other side of the fence, off of Northwoods grounds.

“You’re going to get in trouble, you know,” Eddy said, glancing around and behind.

“What are they gonna do,” Emma asked, “kill me?”

Emma charged behind the sparsely placed trees opposite the fence, all charged up. An open-minded seeker in search of an answer to a question that was asked for her. Eddy followed.

She stopped when she got to the scarecrow.

“This is it,” she said.

“This is what you wanted to show me? Okay, so I’ve seen it. Come on, let’s go back inside before you get caught. It’s cold and you don’t have a jacket.”

“Okay, Mom.”

Eddy rubbed his forehead, looked down, and quietly said, “hey, come on, huh?”

She skipped a joyful circle around the scarecrow, “someplace to put one of these things, don’t you think? Right outside a mental institution. As if we’re not paranoid enough, right? We gotta look out the window and see this spooky old thing hanging there all Christ like without its dignity. A crazy person‘s gonna get ideas.”

“Don’t say shit like that. You’ve been here five days, and you’re talking like you’re some kind of veteran or something,” Eddy kicked earth, planting his foot in, hands in his pockets.

She felt the cold whip around her, hugging her too tight. She looked up into the blank face of the scarecrow, “this is where time goes to die. I saw it with my own two eyes.”

She glanced at him, “that’s all I do at this place, you know?,” she turned back to stare into the blank face again,

“I kill time, and it gets nailed to this post for everyone to see. This is where dreams come to die too. For everyone to see.”

He tugged gently at her shoulder, “come on, let’s just go, huh?”

She pulled away, “it’s kinda funny they didn’t bother to stitch a face on this thing, don‘t you think? I mean, it can be who or whatever you want it to be. Time or a dream. But, what if it’s just a mask. A mask for a shy kind of death. What’s underneath the burlap face of time and dreams?”

The burlap face was brittle and weather beaten. She dug tensely into it with her short unvarnished nails, tearing it apart with her delicate fingers. It cleaved in two and she got on her tippie-toes.

Time stopped. Her breathing stopped. Her heart stopped beating in her chest.

She fell on her butt, kicking and stumbling away. Eddy tried to help pick her up and she fought him, never taking her eyes off of the blank face of time and dreams rent in two by her own hands. Eddy called to her, still trying to help her up. Finally, she tore her gaze away and buried her face in his shoulder. He held her.

After a moment, she looked up at him with a face as blank as the one she destroyed and said, “there are eight dimensions.”

***

She was back in the relative warmth of her own room, sitting on the edge of her bed. Eddy stood.

“What was all that about eight dimensions?” he asked.

She sighed a deep breath and said, “what I meant to say was it’s a sphere, not a line, or a circle. Individually speaking. Or … it’s a pond, universally.”

He didn’t understand what she was saying, but understood it as a symptom of her current condition. He betrayed nothing of his thoughts on his face.

“I’m talking about time,” she continued, “and death. Time is like a pond, you see? You throw a rock in and the ripples go out in all directions, front and back. Something happens in the present, something to remember in the future, little ripples of significance travel back to the past. If you don’t look for these things you can see them or sense them, all the time.

“The individual is like a little ball of clay. As we perceive time rolling along, it stretches the ball of clay and rolls it out into a tube getting thinner and thinner until it eventually breaks. And time continues to roll along, leaving behind little scattered thin bits of clay that spread out around the edges of time, like pebbles on a beach. Until God or something throws one of those pebbles back into the pond, rippling it out back toward the beach again.”

She slapped her knees excitedly and said, “it was a spider and an egg. Behind the face, I mean. A spider told me about time and death. I’m still not sure about dreams though. I’ll have to think about it some more.”

Eddy’s mind was working, and his heart too. Trying to drudge up courage and then what to say, how to say it.

“Dreams,” Emma went on, “see, our dreams are like our children. We create them, but we ultimately have no control over them, and the kind of dreams you can control aren’t really dreams anymore are they? Sometimes our dreams outlive us, if they escape into the so-called real world. The dimension of dreams is like a spider’s leg. No more or less real than the one beside it or opposite it, the waking world. I guess that old saying applies to a person’s dreams too. You know the one about, ‘the greatest tragedy is when a parent outlives their child.’”

Eddy’s blank mask crumbled and his eyes began to water. His chin twitched and he fought gallantly against the sobs.

Through tight vocal chords he told her:

“Em, Mom died last night. It happened around eleven at night. She was out on the deck of the houseboat and she fell into the water. A neighbor heard her scream but they were too late.”

Emma felt ghoulish and selfish. She heard what he said all right, but she was busy thinking about the scream, and she was thinking about time.