• I wake up. Everything’s a blur from the tears in my eyes. I let them stay there; more come in consciousness. The images pulsed through my veins. My personal hallucinogen.

    ‘How could I have let her fall?’ My dreaming thought; my waking thought. ‘Nothing…I did nothing…Her head…all over the ground…blood! blood! it is everywhere…Where are you Rachel? Dead? Dead. Where I cannot find you!’

    The room, a gray room, cold steel throughout, walls like death, the crisp, wrinkled white sheets, that ash throw, a faded fake-wood dresser, folding chairs of beige, the room was lit by the sun filtered through wide vertical blinds. The light moved so fast across the floor.

    I replayed the day in my head. Repeatedly. The operator unbuckling my kids. The Ferris wheel lurching into motion. My girls’ screams. They’re falling. Margot falling straight into my arms. Rachel plummeting headfirst into the cement. I could not save her.

    The hospital was fuzzy though. I could never remember anything from this point. Just doctors rushing around. A different one talks to me each day, explaining how there were only minor cuts and bruises on my child. But I had caught her, so she had suffered none. I remember that. Depression must have set in at that point. How else could I hear an impossible analysis of Margot’s condition?

    Then crying. I have not stopped.

    There was something to do with an official; someone dressed in a suit. Sitting in a room for a long time, then leaving. Everyday. Then a room just as dreary as this one, but with someone else in it also. I do not remember well.

    Then the waking dream began to come. It comes every night. Rachel walks in first. Out of shame, I do not meet her eyes, staring instead at the plainness of the speckled linoleum floor. Margot comes in next, holding my food. This is real. Rachel used to come in with the food when I was worse. I would not touch it then, fearing that eating the food of the dead would place me with them. I would replace Margot with her in my mind. Margot eventually would take over and hand me the food. Then Margot started coming food in hand, not Rachel. She tried to tell me that Rachel was alright, that she was still with us. She tries to make me feel better. I do not understand how Rachel managed to age in my mind. Maybe it comes from my dreams. After all, I know this is a dream. The time moves so slowly here. The light stops moving across the carpet discernibly over the course of a few seconds. Now it takes a half-hour to see.

    My daughter and the ghost leave. I cry harder than at any other point in the day. Constant torment for how I failed to protect her.

    I sleep to escape; the dreams are less painful.