Item #214: a Curiosity

a weird tale: the story of the month for April, 2022

photo by drainrat

Item #214: a Curiosity

by Thomas Pluck

From the L. Erasmus Scott estate, a hand-sewn diary dated 1880, unidentified leather binding. Sixty pages, heavy foxing. Twenty-three pages neatly inscribed in a left-leaning hand. Found inside Item #83, a taxidermy specimen believed to be a highly deformed okapi, to be auctioned separately.

My adventures in dreams have allowed me to lead countless lives. I would trade them all for the one I left behind. —Geff Scott, 7 Sep 1880

11 March 1880

Father tells me I am adopted, that he found me shivering and alone on one of his explorations, and that is why I do not resemble my sister. He seemed concerned that I would be jealous, but nothing could be further from the truth. Through Amalthea, I learned there was magic in the world, from her smile and laughter. She taught me to read, and I devoured Father’s library. We played games and explored our corner of the island, I her protector, she my muse, with her boundless imagination. For each morning, she would tell me of her dreams. I have read that some believe there is nothing more tedious than to listen to someone describe their dreams and attempt to untangle the Gordian logic and hidden meanings, but I have never felt that way.

For I never remember my own night-stories. I awake from blackness each day, as if reborn.

Amalthea on the other hand, weaves entire worlds as she sleeps. Gorgeous forests of flying umbrella-cats and whisper-snakes, spinning across the planets on the backs of turtles, swimming through the dark amongst a pod of crystal dolphins. That is just one.

I pleaded with her to teach the secrets of dreaming to me. She said she simply closed her eyes and went to sleep. Each dawn she woke breathless in bed with cut and muddied feet. While my sister is imaginative, I am the cleverer one. One does not go to bed freshly scrubbed and then wake with dirt between their toes.

She is a sleepwalker. There is nothing to do but follow her.

After the evening meal, I always find my eyes weary. The light pains them, and by nighttime I crawl beneath the covers in the comfort of the dark and wait for Mother to send sister to bed, while Father reads old books in his den. No matter how I try to stay awake to follow my sister—sneaking cold tea from the pot, reciting poems to myself—my eyes betray me, and I would awake the next morning to hear her stories of wondrous dreams while I tended to the cuts on her feet.

So, after she dozed, I took Father’s key and locked our door. Thinking she would wander in circles and be as dreamless as I! But in the morning, I found the door cracked open, and the key still beneath my bedding. Amalthea lay in bed, her feet caked with dust as if she had wandered through a tomb. She sprung awake, eager to tell me of the black jackal-men of the desert and how they conquered a golden kingdom from the backs of house-tall hippopotamuses.

I must be cleverer.