In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

by Ashley Winstead

Your body has a knowing. Like an antenna, attuned to tremors in the air, or a dowsing rod, tracing things so deeply buried you have no language for them yet.

I studied myself the way I’d done my whole life, searching for what others saw when they looked at me.

I let her hug me, ruffle my hair, but I never forgot it. I never forgave her. Most of all, I never absolved myself of the sin of being so utterly forgettable.

This isn’t the Phi Delt basement. This is a set from Law & Order SVU.”

Time, making fools of us all.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.

I wanted to become big enough, important enough, to never really die. Then I would never get trapped in a hole in the ground like my dad, with no one around to care.

This time, I let the danger catch me. I drowned her in the dark.

This was what I’d bought with my soul?

He pulled back to stab me again and I saw it, like déjà vu: I was going to die like Heather. She’d taken my place ten years ago, giving me a decade-long reprieve, but now fate was back to claim me.

“In ten years,” Heather said slowly, “you’re not even going to remember the things that seem important now. You’re going to have totally different priorities. I bet you’ll look back and laugh at everything that feels so dramatic now.”

Whatever happens, we’re going to be happy, okay? I promise.

Then a thought struck me: my dad was the angry man in the dark place, true. But maybe he was also this man—this bright and funny father. I’d always thought it was one or the other, fixed and definite. But maybe it was more complicated. Maybe he was both.

I remembered something I’d said to her once when I was annoyed—maybe sophomore year, maybe junior: Caro, toughen up or the world is going to chew you. Well, she’d toughened. After we’d broken her.