One thing was certain. He wasn’t ready. They were due at any moment, and nothing was ready. Everything lay in piles around him, things he didn’t recognize: clothing, cardboard boxes, wheelchairs, mechanical equipment of some sort, a clutter without logic, without significance. And above all, he thought, there seemed to be nowhere to sit. Somehow, he’d neglected to acquire the sticks of furniture he’d intended to pick up somewhere, and of course something to eat, a bottle of wine, the simple courtesies his guests would have every right to expect. And those sheets of paper with the tidy rows of numbers they’d need to examine, all those numbers they’ll have traveled all this way to inspect. Where on earth had he put them? He could picture them plain as day, those numbers, those reams of onionskin, grayish-white and slippery between his fingers, but where was it he’d seen them last? And there had been plenty of time to prepare, ample time, weeks or maybe even months by now, but somehow unaccountably he hadn’t. And the long-anticipated hour of their arrival had arrived. And then there was the question of this bizarre getup he was wearing, entirely unsuitable for company, open in the back like a surgical gown,…and then, awakening with relief into a world free from the threat of imminent arrivals, where no sheets of paper with their absurdly long columns of numbers actually existed, where he was perfectly innocent of the criminal negligence that reverberated from the dream, where perhaps the anxiety it left behind, in its reluctant retreat, might somehow be compelled to reveal the secret of the dream, the key to its manifest untruth, he slowly drifted into a delicious, systematic, painstaking reconstruction of his blessed actual life, its happy prospects and routine pleasures, the little challenges he’d need to face tomorrow, in the fullness of time, including things far too long delayed, to be sure, including that urgent need to call home, which, as his pulse quickened, he remembered he’d had to put off for several days now. But why? His wife would be frantic with worry. His phone lay right there within reach on the nightstand beside him in the little hotel room. Panic gripped him. His heart pounded…..And then, in gratitude and relief, he awoke into the certainty that anxious burdens of the dream, its heaviness, its nagging aura of guilt, was nothing that need concern him, that the morning sun would soon be rising, that in its light the comforting routines of his day would dispel this strangely lingering dread, this persistent grip of the unreal, the absurd inescapability of the absolutely not-true….But then, awakening gratefully into the embrace of the familiar, into the sheltering darkness of his room, into the warmth of the cotton coverlet, he was soothed by the steady breathing beside him. And yet, he couldn’t help but notice, as he slowly regained the composure that the dream had stripped away, didn’t the location of the windows, the dimly visible furniture, seem to be wrong somehow? Hadn’t things been oddly rearranged? Didn’t everything seem to be elsewhere, closer maybe, than it ought to be?…
DB Jonas is the author of two collections of poetry, Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023) and Flight Risk (2025). He lives in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.