By RW Franklin
Last night I dreamt I sailed deep into the branches of the trees outside my window, and I could no longer see my window. Limbs concealed the ground. I stretched for a trunk to crawl up and out, but my arms swirled vacant air. I was on my back in an open field, staring at the star that seared the night sky and has burned forever and will burn forever and has never burned and will never burn. The ants hoisted me on their backs, and I was their queen and they brought me their stores and said they could not sing my praises because they needed to work. They deserted me in their cavern that went up and up and up while my body grew smaller, and my legs grew longer. I called and I called back. I trained a worm, and he took me to the flower bed by my walkway and told me to be careful—sometimes people walk without looking where they are going. Sometimes people move without taking a step he warned and sometimes they take a step without moving at all. My legs stretched onto the sidewalk as I swore to be careful and to look out for feet that aren’t moving and feet that are moving. The steps were too tall, and the door was too far. I called to the owl who didn’t care who I was or what I wanted or who had helped me get where I was. He flew down and bent his eyes to devour mine. I opened mine inside his twitching skull. We soared into the trees then dove to catch a mouse then sailed to eat the mouse then plummeted back to the stoop where I was ejected from his skull with such violence, I thought for sure I would wake. Instead, I fell through the cement of the stoop and into the cracking foundation and into the dirt and the clay and the muck and grime and have lost all sense of direction and time and space and orient and I cannot breathe, and I am stuck, and I am clawing and calling and pinching and blinking and going nowhere.
RW Franklin lives in Northeast Ohio with her incredibly supportive husband. Her writing has appeared in The Elevation Review, Jenny Magazine, and Five:2:One Magazine’s #thesideshow. She was awarded runner-up of Lit Youngstown’s 2019 Short Short Fiction Contest and she leads the Writing Club at her local YMCA. Her website is www.rwfranklin.com.