She used to dream about her teeth falling out. That was before she married a Vermonter and moved north to a town with no name. Next to her husband in bed, she dreamt about explosions and unfinished tasks. She dreamt about not finding her way back to her hotel room; not getting Maps to work on her phone; not making it in time to the airport; what have you.

Past their first anniversary, her dreams got more intricate. She still didn’t make it in time to the airport but now it was because she forgot her luggage back in her hotel room, and her room keys got lost along the way, and her wallet was left behind in the cab from the airport, so the hotel staff wouldn’t open the door for her because she couldn’t produce an ID. She would wake up covered in sweat and sometimes with tears on her cheeks. One day after breakfast, she opened up to her husband about her dreams. He nodded at all the right moments and smiled at all the wrong ones. After she fell silent, he started rubbing her shoulders and reassured her that everything will be all right, that living this far from home could take its toll on anyone.

“If that’s going to make it easier,” he said. “You can see someone who might help.”

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A few sessions into therapy, she started dreaming about leaving at night. Not necessarily leaving her home or marriage but such random places as her therapist’s office or the coffee place around the corner. Those dreams contained no tension, offered no surprises. After she woke up, she just could never decide whether she was more intimidated by the road all along or what it meant to leave. In all of her dreams, she would first get used to the idea of leaving, and then make for the door but wake up before she could leave everything behind.

In one of her dreams in particular, the only one she chose to keep from her therapist, she was a long-haul driver tasked with delivering a crate from a distributor in Alaska to a warehouse in Kansas. No one told her anything about the content of the cargo and she didn’t ask. Each town she passed through seemed either like an expanded or condensed version of her hometown, with a twist here or an additional shop there. After driving for dream-days behind the wheel, a roadside figure appeared a half-mile ahead, thumbing for a lift. Thanks to some sick cosmic joke, just when she reached over to the passenger door to let the hitchhiker in, her husband nudged her awake. She woke up with a persistent itch between her legs and feeling pregnant, as though the last thing she remembered about her dream wasn’t actually where her dream had ended.

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The last night she spent at their matrimonial home before the birth of her son, she dreamt about books she couldn’t read. In her dream, it wasn’t because she didn’t have time for it but because she forgot how to read. Each word that was plucked from her vocabulary found its way into a book with no page numbers in it, made up to be a dictionary for her baby. The next morning, she gave birth at the hospital to a boy with no distinctive facial features, like the man in her dreams. “Some children just don’t want to be born,” her husband joked during labor. “Like some men who just don’t want to live.”

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That night, she couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard she tried. She left the baby in their shared hospital bed and descended the side stairs to the courtyard. She climbed into the fountain and curled up in the low tide to try and fall asleep. Hours passed but the thought of a dream kept delaying the actual act of dreaming. She conjured in her mind the images of wars, healing tattoos, roadkills, and her husband’s future death, but none stuck around for long enough to put her to sleep. It was the first time she’d felt as if she was getting late for something since the first days of her marriage.

With the first lights of day, some barks of laughter slipped out through one of the upstairs windows. She climbed out of the water fountain and shook the clumps of dirt off her shirt elbows. On her way back in, she crushed the sunflowers by the backdoor with her heels, but nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

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A YW fellow, Sarp Sozdinler’s work has been published in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Masters Review, Normal School, Maudlin House, Hobart, HAD, No Contact, X-R-A-Y, Cheap Pop, among other places. Some of his fiction pieces have been anthologized and received a mention at literary events, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award and the Waasnode Short Fiction prize selected by Jonathan Escoffery. He works on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. You can follow him on @sarpsozdinler and read his work at www.sarpsozdinler.com