mid-July short story

"Billy, you can't go out like that...put on your hat and gloves at least, if you won't wear your scarf."

He was dreaming again, but his mother was calling him the wrong name in the dream. She had always called him Charles, and he had never owned a scarf that he could remember. But he brought it over dutifully to her, in the dream, and she wound it around his neck three times clumsily, brushing his face with the ends as it went past. He lay in bed, face twitching, nearly breaking the surface of sleep.

He went to the front door (it was now the front door of a house from much later, his aunt and uncle's house in Illinois) and opened it to reveal the snow that he had been waiting for, snow he had heard falling by the surreal muffled silence it brought with it. Flakes the size of silver dollars spiraled down in waves of pure white, powdering the ground and drifting up on the car, the porch, the shoulders of his jacket.

He involuntarily wrapped the comforter a little tighter, back in bed, maybe to shield his neck from a draft from the air conditioning vent. He had never been able to bring himself to get a cat, after his wife had died; she had been crazy about the things, but hadn't kept one since they lost two in quick succession to neighborhood cars. The only thing they'd ever been good for was as footwarmers, as far as he was concerned.

He felt the warmth ebbing from his toes as even the dry powder he was trudging through began to stick to his galoshes. It was just a little further down the road, though, to his dad's house, and then there would be all of his cousins, and his brothers, and dad would probably have hung stockings for all of them and stuffed them with all kinds of candy. He could almost taste butterscotch, in the dream.

When he got to the gate, though, it was the gate of his father's first house, from before the divorce, and as he made his way through he could hear his mother's voice from inside alongside all the others. He had not been old enough to remember that house, the house where he was born, but had studied the smiling family posed outside the front gate enough times to see it more clearly than he saw his own house when he was awake. He made a half turn, toward his left shoulder, pressing his face more deeply into the pillow as half-nonsense language started coming through from his dreaming.

"Mom! Dad! Hey everyone!" he called out as he pushed the front door open, the tapestry of voices seeming to recede as he listened into the kitchen. He took a step into the hallway and realized he hadn't taken off his overshoes yet; he couldn't go into the house with them caked in mud, as they suddenly seemed to be. His fingers fumbled with the thick gloves as he tried to tear them off, his scarf crept up into his line of sight each time he bent down to the galoshes. He realized the snow was falling again, suddenly, by the totality of the silence, the muffled dead quiet of the empty house.

He only shifted slightly in his bed, as the dream ended, drifting quietly down into another, deeper stage of sleep; mercifully, perhaps, still hours from waking, and perhaps not to remember the dream again, tonight. He would remember to throw a bag of butterscotch candies into his shopping cart tomorrow, though; he would remember that.