I’m having the nightmare again. We’re playing a game in a big playground behind a school. It looks like my old elementary school, if a little twisted and skewed at the edges. The sun is too bright, and the boy in front of me is just a silhouette. Still, I know we’re playing tag, and I reach out to tag the dark shape. The moment my fingers touch his back, I am frozen. He said something that I don’t remember, and now I can’t move my hand or close my eyes. I know he’s going to turn around to face me, but I won’t see his face. I never do. With every part of my mind, I know that seeing his face will bring more destruction. I’m locked in place. He keeps turning, and I wake up before I see the face.
When I woke up screaming for the third time that week, my cellmate just grunted and threw a slipper at my head. I told him about the dream, and he seemed to feign interest hard, considering how tired he was and how uninteresting nightmares sound when spoken aloud. After a minute, he told me I should shut up and force myself to see the face, which was actually sound advice. He also said I was playing tag wrong if I froze, and I knew he was right.
The rest of that night, I tossed and turned, but Reggie didn’t need to throw anything at me. I was glad he got a good night’s sleep, anyway, since Reggie was the real deal. He was an innocent man on death row, and it looked like some lawyers would finally prove it. Some do-good foundation was handling his appeal, and he said they would prove that he was just in the wrong place, looking like the wrong guy. He didn’t kill nobody. Not like me.
I know I murdered my family. My little girls were just four and seven when I stabbed them in their beds. I killed my wife a few minutes later before driving down the street to a motel. I didn’t remember a thing, but the smart cameras we had installed as a family recorded the entire event. It even showed me walking around the house with my wife’s head before setting it on the kitchen table and walking to the garage.
When they showed me the footage, I begged them to stop. I confessed right then and signed a paper just so they’d turn it off, but I still had to watch it three separate times at the trial. After that, I mentally replayed the images every night before I went to sleep. The grainy image didn’t show their eyes staring up at me as I dismembered them, but I could see them in my head. I couldn’t have imagined hurting them in my worst nightmares, but then that became all I could see. That and a childhood game that tugged at the borders of my memory. I couldn’t rightly believe it, but I learned to accept it the way I accept gravity and hell.
The next day proceeded like the seven hundred and thirty-eight before it. Despite my heinous crime and Reggie’s supposed one, we were always part of the “good behavior” crew, with liberty to work in the laundry and get our outside time. I know there must be plenty of sadistic prison guards out there, but me and Reg never got their attention. Our guards knew he got a bum rap and always seemed to hope I had, too.
I must have missed more sleep than usual, because the day took on a dreamlike state the later it got. While Reggie and I loaded the big dryers, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I wheeled around looking for the boy from my dreams. Knocking the wet towels on the floor, I made enough noise to scare poor Reggie as well. He even helped me look around the cramped room for a boogeyman in the shadows.
In the yard, I thought I saw myself standing on the other side of the fence. It looked like me, at least, free as a bird, with a full beard like I had before this place. I waved. I blinked once, and I was still there. A second blink, and the image was gone.
I ate my dinner quietly and curled up on my cot even before lights out. Reggie had to stir me for evening roll call, and I didn’t bother telling him about what I saw in the yard. I didn’t need him thinking I was crazier than he already did.
I’m in the playground again. The sun isn’t as bright anymore. It’s practically dusk when I see the boy in front of me. I want my hand to not reach out, but that’s not how dreams or nightmares work, and my hand is about to touch him when he says, “Now I’m it.” I freeze, and he starts to laugh. The laugh starts as a boyish chuckle before it slowly becomes an inhuman howl. I can’t see his face, but for a moment, I feel like I’m seeing my own boyish face through his eyes.
The image jolted me awake, but I didn’t scream this time. In the darkness, I kept my eyes open and concentrated on what I had seen and heard. I remembered the words he said this time. I’m not sure if he said it in other dreams before, but I never remembered it until that night. The eerie feeling of seeing my young face through his eyes ran through my mind. I looked scared. It was that raw fear that only young children feel free to express, and it was probably the last look my little girls had when they woke up to see their loving father’s face. If life was fair, it would be the look burned into my brain whenever I thought of them. I would see it every waking moment. Life ain’t fair, though, and I was having a dream pitying my younger self while I could still imagine the very alive, smiling faces of my family. I closed my eyes and forced myself to remember all the pain I caused before I finally let myself fall asleep.
The next day was number seven hundred and forty on death row. It proceeded like at least seven hundred of those days before. Me and Reg folded laundry, and nothing jumped out from the darkness. Everywhere I was, I thought I heard that voice speaking again. I swore I heard the voice in the basketball yard when the guards were changing shifts behind us, and I listened close enough to hear it behind the normal shuffle as we walked past the cells before bedtime. Of course, now I know I didn’t really hear anything, but I was pretty sure that day.
I’m back in the playground, and the sun is shining too brightly again. This time, the whole place is deserted. I can hear nothing but the occasional creaking of swings moving in some breeze I can’t feel. I start to take a step, but my foot is wrapped up in what feels like a pile of sandbags. At my feet, I see my little girls, lifeless and thrown in a heap of limbs and blond hair. Nobody else would recognize them, but I see the chipped polish on the fingernails I helped paint. I recognize the Bluey pajamas beneath the blackened blood staining them from seam to seam. These are my babies, and it is my fault they can never smile again. I am not frozen. I can scream. My mouth opens so I can shriek pain into the empty playground, knowing the only good that can come of it is me waking up in prison, childless and alone. I have to do it to get away from their tiny bodies.
My eyes opened, and I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t screaming. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even move. A shadow slithered around the outer edge of my vision, and it wasn’t Reggie. I didn’t know how I knew that. I wondered if I was drugged, but that made less sense in here than a shadow monster. Still, my eyes felt heavy, and I felt drowsy, and I felt my eyelids closing right as the shadow’s creator started to come into view.
I woke up to the lights and sounds of morning announcements for roll call. I had just started getting dressed when I locked eyes with Reggie. He asked me if I had a bad dream, and I agreed that I had. I watched him keep his distance when I asked why, and he didn’t answer at first.
“You gotta stop having dreams, man.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s gettin’ outta hand. I gotta feel safe, too.”
“Sorry?”
“You should be, man! You tried to kill me! You put a pillow over my face, and I’m just lucky I’m stronger than you seem in your sleep.”
“Are you sure it was me?”
“It looked like you, and it was in this cell. I don’t know if you’ve ever been smothered with a pillow, but my eyes were mostly covered until I fought you off.”
“And you just let me go back to sleep?”
“No… No, I think you hit me or somethin’. I don’t know.”
I didn’t have an answer for Reg at the time, so I just said I was sorry and hoped he would forgive me. By the time breakfast was over, it seemed like he had already forgotten. Quick to forgive, he was. Maybe too quick, but he didn’t have the heart of a killer.
He never did ask me about the dream the night before, and that was just as well. I didn’t wanna talk about that dream anyway, and I didn’t mind heading down to the laundry room in silence.
We were tryin’ to load the big washers with dirty towels and jumpsuits, but I must have made Reggie pretty jumpy by that point. He seemed to be looking into every shadow with grim expectation, and I’m still not sure how he let anyone get the drop on him. He did, though.
I was just looking up from another full washer when I heard the muffled cry behind me. I spun around so quick I thought I was in the dream world again. Shadows were too dark, and overhead lights weren’t illuminatin’ like they should have. In sharp focus, I only saw the man holding Reggie from behind with a sharpened piece of steel to his throat.
He slowly pulled his face around Reggie’s head, out of the shadows, and I saw something that looked a lot like my face. Without the beard, he looked a lot like me. In the jumpsuit, I wasn’t sure if it wasn’t me across the room. Instantly, I realized it was the face from my dreams, the face I never saw or at least never remembered until that moment. By the time I realized that, it was too late to act.
He tried to tell me he was my long-lost brother, or maybe my Mr. Hyde. None of it made a lick of sense, I’ll be honest. I ain’t got no brother, and I don’t need a Mr. Hyde to do things that I don’t really want done.
After a bit of improv, he told me a story that seemed most likely, but even then, I knew he had been stretchin’ the truth quite a bit. He said he saw me around the neighborhood when we was kids. He said that even then, he could tell we looked alike, and we might’ve played some schoolyard games together. Years went by, and we both stayed in town. Eventually, he came to want my life, but he didn’t like it when he tried. He said my kids asked too many questions about stupid things, and my wife wasn’t so easily fooled. He said she wouldn’t shut up. So decided to clean up his mess, and though there was really no sense to him of crying over spilled milk. Evidently, he had already drugged me up in some hotel so he could play house, and he was pretty surprised how it all worked out.
He might still have been spouting a story at that point, but it hardly mattered. As he was wrapping up, he slid the blade easily across Reggie’s throat. After years of bad movies and not actually hurting anyone myself, I expected a thin line of blood, but it wasn’t like that. Blood spurted as he hit the artery, and my cellmate’s windpipe gave out a squeezed burst of air and blood that combined to sound like a yowling cat. I tried to scream, but I felt frozen in my dream again.
He slipped out moments before the guards came in, and a more cynical man would think he had ruined the rest of my life at that moment. They only saw one man on the fuzzy, audio-less cameras in that laundry room, and he looked an awful lot like me. They hated me for killing Reggie and wanted to put me in the hole and move up my execution date. I could fight it, but what would that give me but a longer time away from my family?
This way, I win. I get to see my wife and little girls soon, knowing that I’m innocent. They always knew. Now, he’s taken away the only grip he had over me: shame. I’m free, and he’s about to lose his favorite scapegoat to a small series of injections that can finally end this hateful part of my life.