Casey's Dream Book

Author : Will Strouse

If Casey wasn’t so hard to understand, she would be perfect; we kissed for the first time at work… The next day, we still got along… at work.

Kind of weird that she can never hang out after work…

She says she lives alone downtown but I don’t know where…

At the end of the day she gets anxious; acts like I don’t exist.

Next day everything’s cool again, except she won’t acknowledge that us just being intimate at work is weird.

One day I followed her home…

Figured she must be married(unhappily)…

Found out she wasn’t…

She acted like everything was normal…We had dinner… I stayed over… Things felt okay… for a bit.

Then something happened, I couldn’t explain..

She fell asleep… I got up and went into her kitchen & when I came back to bed she was gone… I searched her entire house, but there was no sign of her…. yet her front door was locked…

The next morning she reappeared… When I asked her where she had been, she acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about…

I realized we had to break up…

We stopped talking for a week…

She started flirting with Nat Gander… I hate that guy.

I missed her.

One day after work we got coffee and talked honestly for the first time… She said she was afraid of the dark as a kid… and that’s why she’d gotten all weird at the end of the day… Wasn’t sure that explained anything…. but it was progress…

I stayed over at her place again… This time I watched her for awhile… then I left the room… By the time I got back she had vanished… I looked everywhere for her… Called out her name…

Then I saw something in her hallway that took my breath away…

The next morning I told her about the man that showed up after she disappeared… Said he was her father…

She laughed in disbelief.

I told her she’s either a shape shifter – her power nourished by her compulsive denial… or her dreams come to life.

I got a video camera and stuck around…

I watched her all night, made sure she didn’t disappear… Then I’d test it out… let her go… & dream… most of the time there was nothing around but empty space… I got lucky a few times though and wrote down what I saw… & pretty soon I got to know some of the characters from her dreams…

my favorite was Andre, a unicorn missing it’s horn…. there was a crocodile that lived in her tub that scared me… scared her parents too… her best friend from college told me to leave… but someone had to write her dream book…

I stopped going to work so I could sleep during the day…

And then one night, I met something that had taken on my exact resemblance, claiming to be me… It left and let me see through its eyes… the outside world… less and less frequently…

Pretty soon I lost my reflection…

When I woke up I saw her reflection… she was sitting on the ground writing in my dream book…

I never saw myself again.

Instead, I closed my eyes and dreamt of blackness and falling purple stars.