See yourself lying in your bed and want to become one person instead of two. But you can’t be afraid. You can’t think of anything else. If you do, that is what will surround you. Anything you think of while you sleep will be around you and will become your life if you allow it. You have to remember who you really are and where you really belong. Every time you forget or let yourself get scared, you lose a piece of who you are. The darkness takes it and you never get it back.”
Her words were too simple. They did not carry the meaning and significance I was expecting. “How can that be all there is? Why didn’t your mother and sisters do that then?”
Her sobbing stopped long enough for her to speak again. “The little girl’s Mother cast a curse for them to be lost until they die. She did it for all of us, but I’m the only one who got away.”
“Why would she do that?”
She lifted her gaze to my eyes. “Because you tried to kill her. You turned her into the serpent and destroyed her human powers. Now she can only hurt us when we sleep.”
“Why only when we sleep?”
“Because we are in her world then. She needs our souls to become human again.”
She looked down at the floor once again. Tears dripped from her face and splattered onto the dusty wooden floor. “What happens if she gets our souls?”
“Everything will be fire and darkness.”
I could not think of anything other than the words of terror being spoken by my very young daughter. How could she know these things?
“Where is your mother?”
Her speech quickened. “She ran from the big man. She went into the forest. The little girl called me over, she told me she would keep me safe. I was frightened. I went with her. Mama never returned.”
“When we sleep again, will we see the big man you spoke of?”
“The little girl said he is a demon and he would follow Mama so that she can never return home.”
“What about your sisters?”
“They ran too. They can get away as I did, but I don’t think they know how.”
I lifted her from the floor and held her close to me. Together we mourned the loss of Mary, Clara, and Anna. As the moments passed I became increasingly filled with exhaustion. I took refuge in the wooden rocker I had built thirteen years prior, before Clara’s birth. Emma nestled on my chest like an infant. Together we slept.
My first evening with the curse was like no other I had ever experienced. I am unsure of the timeline, as there was no way to track time passing. Becoming conscious within myself was not as I had expected.
When I first awoke within myself, I was lying in the dirt outside our home. Emma was kneeling on the ground beside me, attempting to rouse me with her hands upon my chest, rocking me back and forth. “Papa—Papa wake up!”
I opened my eyes to the warmth of the afternoon sun. The light was bright and my eyes were unaccustomed. I moved in and out of consciousness. “Papa, please wake up!”
Hearing her voice once again jolted me fully awake. I called out her name and quickly lifted myself off the ground. “Did we sleep through the night already? I don’t recall anything taking place.”
She looked up at me as I dusted the dried dirt off my pants. “Papa—we are sleeping right now. Look, it’s warm out.”
I had not even realized that the temperature was not what it should be for mid December. The air, warm and humid, felt as if it were a July afternoon. I looked around to orient myself. Everything appeared as it did in my everyday life. Not one single detail was out of the ordinary. Emma’s small hand reached into mine. “We can’t stay here in the open like this. We must go, Papa.”
I was unsure of everything in that moment. My small, brave leader proudly guided me to safety inside our home. As we walked up the path to the door of the house, I looked around and began to see and hear what surrounded me.
The warm wind blew across my skin and rustled the leaves on the trees. Crickets chirped in the distance. Birds flew across the meadow and loudly chirruped their messages to each other. Our horses grazed peacefully on the grass nearby. The dirt and rocks from the path crumbled and crunched under