As I walk home from the trail, my mind becomes increasingly more troubled.

There’s a flash in the periphery of my vision and I can see the beast, the one from my childhood dreams, standing in the darkness, watching me with all four of its heads.

I stop walking, closing my eyes, trying to will it away, but when I open them, it is still standing there. I shake my head, slamming the heel of my hand against it, over and over but I can still see it out of the corner of my eye.

It isn’t real. I know that it isn’t real. It was just a dream.

Steadying myself, I turn to face it and it’s only then that I can see that it’s not the beast from my dreams, but only a solitary coyote. It’s watching me, so I watch it. When I turn back towards the trail, it turns to follow me. I yell, throwing my arms into the air, trying to make myself look as big as possible, and it skitters away into the darkness.

I’m suddenly more aware of my surroundings, feeling isolated with a nagging hint of fear beginning to creep towards the surface. I pick up my pace and soon I can see the lights of the neighborhood.

When I arrive home, I can feel the pull towards the bottle of vodka, but I ignore it, knowing that I needed my mind to be clear and my body to be clean of any substances for what was to come next. Instead, I get ready for bed, and once completed, sit in the corner of my room on the floor. I plug my headphones into my phone, and put one earbud in and then the next. Pressing play, I let my mind drift as I listen to the soft, meditative chords of a piano. My eyes are growing heavy and when my head nods forward, heavy with sleep, I lay down and close my eyes.

Soon I’m asleep and the dreams begin.

When I was a teenager, after constant begging, my parents finally conceded and bought me a dog. She was a purebred Border Collie that I named Jackie. Eventually, we ended up buying another dog—this time a male—and started to breed them as a side business.

Jackie was always somewhat disconnected from her puppies. When she was ready to give birth to her first litter, she was in her pen, pacing up and down a narrow path of dirt while giving birth. I found several puppies lying in the pen that I picked up, placing them inside Jackie’s dog house. Arms spread, I wandered the pen, corralling Jackie into her dog house to give birth to the rest of the litter. Even after giving birth, she wouldn’t stay inside the dog house, sitting in the far corner of the pen ignoring her offspring. It was as if she didn’t know what to do, so my dad and I pushed her inside the dog house, blocking the door, checking in occasionally until she started to nurse her puppies at regular intervals; her maternal instincts finally kicking in.

When I was in college, I had a dream about Jackie. In the dream, her stomach was distended, enlarged more so than any other pregnancy. She stood outside the dog house, her stomach moving in and out like a billow at an old-timey blacksmith forge, until blood started trickling out of her dilating vagina. The blood was soon followed by an oversized puppy, still in its embryonic sac. It slid out, thumping to the ground. I bent down, looking at the outline of the puppy inside the sac, waiting for it to move, but it never did. Turning my eyes they met Jackie’s. Her eyes looked sad and full of pain. “Why did you let this happen to me?” they seemed to ask. Her breath was quick, panting in and out, at the same speed of the movement of her stomach.

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Thump. Another puppy, stillborn.

I put my hand behind her ear, giving her a comforting scratch.

Thump.

Jackie’s tongue hangs out of her mouth as her panting intensifies. In a strangely humanoid way, she begins to gasp for breath; sucking in huge amounts of air, letting it out in a whuff. Again and again, until she opened her mouth and let out a scream full of pain and horror.

I awoke at that moment, feeling disturbed, and rightly so.

It wasn’t until months later that I understood that dream was a premonition. A large black labrador had jumped over the fence into her pen, sensing that she was in heat, and impregnated her. She was never the same after giving birth to the lab-mix puppies who were larger at birth than any of her previous litters. It tore her up inside and the floor of the dog house was slick with her blood after she gave birth to her final litter of puppies—two of which were stillborn.

A few months after they were weaned she died.

In the aftermath of her death, I was harrowed by the images of the dream.

The blood.

The emerging embryonic sac, sliding in and out like a record needle stuck in a groove; pushing out and being sucked in over and over again.

My dog, screaming.

Dreams used to be where the mystics lived. A world filled with the known, the absolutely unknown, and elements of the partially unknown that our consciousness is constantly trying to sort through. Every layer of the dream state is full of anxieties and fears, hopes and desires.

My eyes open and the room is dark, except for a tiny bit of light coming in from the street. Veronica’s old rocking chair is back in the corner of the room and she sits there, rocking silently back and forth, tears streaming down her face. In her arms she’s holding Eleanor. Eleanor is wrapped in a blanket, her tiny feet sticking out of the end. Pushing myself into a seated position, I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and stand, walking to them. Veronica doesn’t say anything—she just sits there, looking at me, crying. I pull back the blanket around Eleanor’s face. She’s pale, her lips purple. I can see now that she isn’t breathing; her chest is still.

“Why did you let her die?” Veronica screams at me.

I stumble back, my hand still holding onto the blanket, and I fall, pulling Eleanor out of Veronica’s lap where she lands stiffly on the floor. I brush the hair out of her face, adjusting her so that she lays flat on the floor, arms folded across her chest.

“Why did you let her die?” Veronica asks again. She slides down out of the chair and kicks out with her heel, connecting with my jaw.

I fall to the floor, my mouth filling with blood. I let it trickle out of my mouth and onto the carpet. I feel the inside of my mouth with my tongue until I find a loose tooth. As my tongue brushes against it the tooth falls out. I choke, unable to spit it out; mouth opening and closing in gasps. I grit my teeth, but more teeth tumble loose, falling into the floor of my mouth on and around my tongue. I gag on the taste of blood and decay, my tongue pressing against the exposed gums and nerves, but I still can’t spit the contents of my mouth out.

Veronica hovers over me like a phantom, watching me choke on my own blood next to the body of our daughter. Breathing is getting difficult, even through my nose. There’s a trickle of blood that I’m spraying on myself and Eleanor with every exhale. The lack of oxygen combined with the sense of panic I’m experiencing is making things fuzzy and I feel tired.

“Shhhh,” Veronica says, pinching my nostrils.

I shake, trying to fight it off, but I feel tired; so tired.

“Shhhh,” Eleanor says as her corpse sits up. She reaches up, her still cold hand petting the top of my head.

“I’m sorry,” I want to say, but I can’t speak and the effort in trying to makes me choke even more.

I’m tired. I want to lay down, so I do and I descend to a place where the dreams can’t chase me.