Flash fiction by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Every Night I Go to Sleep I Dream I’m Standing on a Pier, Staring Out at the Sea

I call my parents at three in the morning. “Why are you calling us at three in the morning?” my dad says.

“I was having bad dreams,” I tell him.

“You’re fifty-seven,” he says. “You’re supposed to be having bad dreams. Go back to sleep.” He hangs up the phone.

So I go back to sleep, and in my dream I’m calling my parents, but they never pick up the phone.

*

I think about what my dad said and I call my parents the next day to apologize profusely, but they don’t remember I’ve called. “Okay,” I say. “But you said something about how I’m supposed to have bad dreams at my age. What is that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it means?” my dad says. “The older you get, the worse it gets. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Wait,” I say. “What are your dreams like then?”

“Nothing but screaming,” my dad says. “Sometimes I fall out of the bed. Sometimes it’s your mother.”

“And the tentacles,” my mom says. “Don’t forget about all the tentacles.”

“Tentacles?” I ask, doing my best not to sound alarmed.

“Just you wait for the tentacles,” my mom says. “Are you still going to have lunch with us Sunday at 1:00?”

“Let’s meet at Howard’s on the pier,” my dad says. “I’ll make the reservation.”

*

At Howard’s my parents order octopus. I order the fried squid. “You should take it easy on all the fried food,” my mom says. “You’ll get bad dreams.”

“But if I’m going to get bad dreams anyway,” I say, “why shouldn’t I eat whatever I want?”

“Bad dreams AND high cholesterol,” my dad says, sticking a fork with a chunk of octopus on it at me. Like he knows what he’s talking about.

“You think it’s hard running in your dreams now,” my mom says. “Wait till you find out.”

“Try running anywhere after your first heart attack,” my dad says.

I flag the server and change my order to a salad.

*

In my dreams there is so much cholesterol, and I don’t care. I’m eating the fried chicken of my childhood, the fried clams, the fried everything.

The ocean seethes. I’m sitting on a bench, my greasy fingers reaching into the to-go bag, pulling out a French fry, a clam strip. 

Each thing I eat in this dream is only going to make it worse. I know that, nobody has to tell me. But I keep eating, I’m enjoying every morsel I put in my mouth. The crunch. The salt, the chewy bits, everything.

*

My son calls me to tell me about his dreams. It’s always summer, he’s in the car with us on our way to go to the beach, but the car breaks down. We fix it and something else breaks. We fix that but now it’s dark. But we’re nearly there, so we go to the beach in the middle of the night, in the dark. Other people are there too, some families; pairs sneak off. They sound like birds. They don’t return.

The moon is full, we’re busy eating.

We don’t mind it when our kids go swimming in the ocean. We don’t mind when they never come back. We don’t even call.

“What do you think that means?” my son asks. 

“Have you ever just sat there,” I say. “Looking out for something nobody can see?”

“Sometimes,” my son admits.

“Keep doing that,” I say. “You’ll see.”