Six
My dreams were strange that night. I found myself lying on a blanket in the sand. The sun was bright and warm on my face at Smoke Hill Beach. Funny, but I was dressed in my pjs.
“Hello, Annabelle,” a weirdly familiar voice said.
I sat up to find a boy walking toward me. Believe it or not, but I couldn’t tell how tall he was, or what color his hair was, or anything concrete about him, except he had the most lovely gray eyes. Their color swirled, like storm clouds and were the only thing I could focus on in his face. Everything else about him shifted and changed as soon as I tried to look at it more closely.
How did he know my name?
“Hi.” He came and sat down on my blanket, leaning back on his elbows. My dream self didn’t ask him who the hell he was or wonder where he had come from.
His face turned toward me and grinned. Or at least I thought he did. It was gone too quickly. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
I met his hurricane eyes. “No.”
“That’s all right.” He gestured with one of his arms. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”
“Go ahead.” We sat there on the beach, until the tide came in and lapped at our toes. He sighed and closed his eyes. With a click, the dream shifted and he was gone. Suddenly I was in the grocery store and I had a giant pineapple in my cart and was running from a man in a hotdog suit.
When I woke in the morning, I couldn’t remember much. Just those eyes, and the feel of the sand between my toes. The more I tried to remember it, the more it faded. I spent the rest of the day trying to hold onto it.