A boy sleeps, and he dreams: He dreams of fear and he dreams of hell and he dreams of where he lives now and will forever more, and he dreams of the faces of his family burning in these long nights of his days, and he dreams, too, of past worlds, the faces of men; the faces of the sons of men, covered in furs and skins and painted in the death of others their hollowed eyes of broken glory coming hard on wild mounts from hell, these devil hooves pounding the earth in the name of all those that have come before them.

 

He wakes and he screams, and his father tells him, it’ll be okay, and the boy backs away like some crab-like cave creature, his hands and feet scrambling amongst the scattered dreams of past plagues until backed against a weeping wall of fear and desolation. He looks away, the blue of a dead screen flickering, and he closes his eyes, and he says to himself, don’t dream.

 

Next to him, in the dark of that same night, his younger sister, fearful in these times and lost to it, knows she too will dream, the warmth of the room, her father there and holding her hand, helping, and yet her tears still fall, tears she won’t feel in her never-ending dreams of an echoing silence lost to the unforgiving vastness of a darkness everywhere. She wakes, a noise in the night, and she looks to the window and her reflection there – falling.

 

Her father's hand to her forehead, and he says, there there now, now now, and he feels the rattling of her fear chewing bones and soft tissue coming to him and settling heavy upon him. He leans forward and he whispers, it’ll be okay, and she squeezes his hand and she closes her eyes and she waits to flee, once again, a little girl on the back of duskywings.

 

And now the father, sitting upright next to his children, sleeps, and he too dreams, these dreams of which are always dreams of long, dark, empty streets. Stopping, his heart pounding and resounding in his head, he watches thin pools of water gathered upon the road beginning to ripple. He looks behind him, an immeasurable distance back to the birth place of darkness itself. He turns to run and a two-headed dog with massive jaws that foam and drip sink both sets of jaws deep into his face. He falls to the cobblestone surface of the road, his faceless head lulling forward, the dog’s jaws taking it, fighting to enter his red dark hole. They hollow him out. They rip and consume the skin from his bones and they eat the bones so all that remains of him is a skull dripping in blood from a scalp that is nothing more than a few splotches of dark hair.

 

The man wakes covered in sweat, and sitting up in the darkness of a COVID night, he whispers to himself, it’ll be okay.