Bernhard

“It’s probably just before dusk. I’m eight and my friends and I are running across a field toward the edge of the woods. I recognize this place as Mr. Montgomery’s estate off Backlick road in Fort Washington. He was a good friend of my grandfather’s. We’d do yard work for him in the summer when I was out of school. Anyway, we’re running for the woods when I look to my side and recognize a young girl running next to me. She’s smiling at me and reaching out for my hand. I take it and we run together and I’m smiling and the high grass is cutting our legs as we race closer and closer toward the thick trees ahead. I hear laughing. It’s that common children’s laugh you hear all the time in movies or television, but this doesn’t register because I’m trying to place where I know the girl from. We slow down and watch my friends disappear one by one into the woods. It’s not a slow vanishing either. It’s like a blip, like someone editing them out of the dream. One by one. And I start getting this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. This feeling that something terrible is happening to us but I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to move. That’s when I wake up.”

I turn my head from the acoustic ceiling tile to look at Bernhard. He wants me to call him Bernard because he’s afraid I’ll mispronounce his last name. Something Swedish.

“Do you feel physically ill when you wake up?”

I’ve been seeing Bernhard once a week since my dad died. My mother set me up with the visits to help with some of the problems I developed. Anger and depression. The anger subsided about a year after when I realized the old man was really nothing to hate. He lived most his life (and subsequently, mine) in a drug induced haze. You can’t fault a guy for that. You get through life anyway you can.

“It’s not the same as in the dream. I was scared at first. But then I just really wanted to know who the girl was.”

She only exists in dreams. She’s not real. When I was eight, I had pneumonia. The fever had me hallucinating that small insects were climbing all over my arms and legs. My mother was up all night watching my small eight-year-old chest rise and fall. I dreamt of this girl before. I remember her curly brown hair and the yellow sundress. This time, I chased her down creek behind my house. When I’d finally caught up to her it was raining and she asked if she could be my girlfriend. I never answered but she would show up periodically in my dreams throughout my adolescence. Now I’m twenty-one. And she’s there again. Bernhard thinks this means something. I tell him it means nothing. I tell him it’s all Jungian, no Freud, but the guy won’t budge.

It’s a weird relationship we have. We’ve seen each other probably fifty weeks out of the year, but it’s all professional. I never crack jokes that I do with my friends, but we have this intellectual understanding between us. He understands my philosophies and I understand his. We may not agree but once a week we swap a story that in some way or another will jog the cogs of awareness.

...

I've been dwelling in this uninspired mood lately. It's a drag but I managed to purge a little something out for you this evening. Nothing spectacular. I can't work on Russo because I've become slightly disinterested in it for the time being. I made notes on a physical copy last night and even began to make changes to the electronic copy on my laptop. So there is a story. It is finished. It has an ending and I'm really happy with it. I just need to beef up some sections and amend a few errors and I'll have it posted here.
I want to mention that Russo started where it ends. Meaning, I wrote a small excerpt and decided to put it in a larger concept. I wrote that excerpt in retaliation to a poor simile written by James Franco in his short fiction I Could Kill Someone where he says,

"I rode fast and the cold air on my face felt like I was riding through ghosts".

I liked that simile so much but I felt it wasn't strong enough. So I wrote it better. It wasn't until a few weeks later I thought,

Why is he riding? There might be a story here...

So that's where all this started. The next day I had the day off so I jumped on my computer and wrote the first seven pages of what would become Russo.