I heard her dreaming

Sometimes, at night, I wake up and I listen to her breathing.

Her breathing is strained, difficult, because of the cigarettes she smokes. Sometimes it seems to me that she is crying in her sleep, in her dream. Then I raise my head, lean it upon my hand and I study her face, her eyeballs trembling under the closed eyelids. I can see the tears making their way down through her long lashes, and rolling slowly along her temple until they drop on the pillow.

When she weeps I know what she is dreaming of, and I don’t have to guess what is going through that crazy head of hers that I love so much. I know that she dreams of the child whom we shall never have. And I gently wipe the tears or kiss them, sometimes touching my finger to one of the salted drops and tasting it. She is a very sensitive woman and her mood swings are forceful and unexpected, just as her states of consciousness, both intellectual and the emotional, are inclined to changes which she can explain and analyze in such a rational and clever way.

But since that night when I succeeded, as she says, to penetrate into her, to get finally and totally under her skin — I inseminated her with the child whom she lost years ago as a sacrifice for that disgraceful Moloch worship.

Obviously this was just a symbolic fertilization, because in this stage of our relationship, we were still discovering ourselves and did not yet arrive at the haven of refuge where the big Turtles lay their eggs in the warm sand.

As a scientist in the life sciences, who knows how to deal with cells, cultures of microbes and exact formulas, sometimes I try, just for myself and not for any scientific purpose, to analyze the multiplication of her fantasy cells that I show her on the Polaroid snapshots I take when she isn’t paying attention. They clearly show the dream threads made of glowing cellular tissue, and they look on the photograph like chains of beads in different sizes. She gets quite excited by this, but only from the artistic aspect. Since she is a perennial woman, multi faceted and a Ph.D in European history, I do not get into scholarly arguments with her, and deliberately let her create and tell her own special versions of her inconstant life story. Actually it does not matter at all, because I have already learned that when I enter her she becomes an ocean of body waves and soul storms that strike my senses, and contrary to all of evolution’s rules, I turn into a winged Whale that overwhelmed by pleasure is ready to commit suicide in the secret cave between her thighs, which has a Cinnabar scent such as I’ve never smelled before in my life, not even at that very advanced laboratory for olfactory research at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

And so, as I watch her in her sleep, she suddenly seems to me so very fragile and remote, folded in her body’s suitcase that wanders in her subconscious voyages.

I rest my big hand carefully on her belly and draw my face to her neck’s niche and breath the smell of her heavy breathing and think science fiction style thoughts, how I shall discover some kind of a miraculous molecule which I can transplant into her delicate dream tissue, and since this molecule contains the essence of our union, which she carries in that single chip from which she (the Molecule) is composed of, that child whom she uses to call “the minuscule you that dwells in me” (“that is within me”), who appears from time to time in her dream. And this will be our spirit child.

I draw myself to her side and send my little finger to remove the sweat drop from her forehead, (and) then, suddenly, she opens her eyes and asks me why I’m not asleep and if I heard her dreaming, because she felt as if something was dripping into her head.

And I laugh at this crazy idea she got in the middle of the night ,and as she falls back to sleep, so small in my arms, I smile to myself thinking, that maybe the experiment I did in my idea laboratory has indeed succeeded.

— edited by Dotan Dimet