March 2009 — Sentry

The night after my adoptive grandmother is buried I have a nightmare. In my dream I lie awake in a large room, while in one corner my grandmother sleeps on a slab of granite. It is just light enough in this room to make out forms, and I see my dead grandmother slowly sit up and then rise. When she approaches my bed I lie frozen, voiceless. She leans down toward me and I see not her familiar face, but the rough bark of a tree. She reaches out with arms – branches actually – and I notice a series of holes running in straight lines along her thin wooden extremities. I scream, in both dream and reality, and wake.

This frightening apparition appears for the next three nights and ends the same way each time. I scream and sit up in bed, a light goes on, and I see my increasingly concerned parents standing in the doorway of my bedroom.

I’m almost a teenager, I try to remind myself. This stuff only happens to kids.

Zhou Lei, my Chinese language teacher, knows about these things. So on Sunday, after my lesson, I stay behind at Temple B’nai Chaim and tell her my problem.

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