Grass. He had loved grass. Fields sprouted and spread through his dreams like fire on a lake of gasoline- when he fell asleep on the damp earth, his gray mind fuzzed over with deep green. He ran, not mechanically, nor fearfully, nor arduously, but ran like a man freed from prison, or a man waking out of a coma and coming home -- ran like joy shooting across synapses, ran to make himself part of the freedom of this unreal world. He was breathing, not just to take in oxygen, but to assimilate the scents- wild scents like old wood and green things growing. The air was always that of late summer, at dusk, just warm, igniting the light dust rising from the woven ground into gold. And in the middle of the dream field, in the depths of these infinite grasses, was the girl. Always.
She lay on a quilt spread over a little patch of grass clipped short like moss, unapologetically nude- bare, like everything else, to the warm deepening late-afternoon blue of the sky. She would be one shade of skin, a natural Greek tan; no cloth had ever shaded her, but the sun wouldn't scorch her. Her long body curved in at the waist and out at the hips defiantly, dramatically, as if God meant to convey through her the essence and strength of femininity itself. She would lie back, propped up on her elbows, one knee arched, watching him run towards her from the horizon, calm, patient, smiling. His memory served him this scene during every deep sleep he managed to settle into, but the real world did not.
In the real world, he twitched on the cold dirt. He was close enough to death that it didn't matter. He had given up, and so his subconscious ignored the dark and frigid; it ignored the wet and the cuts and bruises and led him to this bright dying place, half memory and half fantasy.
So he was there, slowing his sprint towards her, stopping, panting as he dropped to his knees on the soft stunted grass in front of her. They shared a smile as she shifted herself forward, crawled towards him, and sat up on her knees a foot away, close enough for him to smell the air she exhaled into the breeze. Her eyes were a few inches below his - eyes that did not move from his face, the stare so complete that it was like she was holding him, physically, with trust, gratitude, love, and desire.
The sound of old metal creaking and banging echoed across the dream field. He opened his eyes and saw a slit of light flash into a blinding rectangle where the cell door had been slammed open. The silhouette of a guard threw a pouch of water to his feet. Then the door closed and the room was black again. He crawled towards where it had fallen, pulling himself with his hands, dragging his legs, eyes glazed over with pain. When he had emptied the pouch, he put his head down on it and passed out.
The sun became a little lower, in the seamless, instantaneous way time passes in dreams. Her skin tightened into ripples of goosebumps. She turned her face away from him, breaking their gaze for the first time in hours, or seconds, he could not remember. Her nipples hardened as the wind combed lazily through the taller grasses around them, ebbing around her naked figure. She sat back on her haunches. He moved on his knees toward her, onto the quilt- a thick blue comforter that changed its hue to match the sky as the sun melted into horizon. It was soft and, somehow, springy and supportive. When she turned back to him, her face was a quarter's length away. He found that he was naked now, too- a gust of wind rushed through the invisible hair on his bare back and between his legs. He could feel her heat near his stomach, his chest. Their noses brushed. Light shone and disappeared between their kneeling figures. The ends of her small, stiff nipples made contact, just, with the skin of his taut stomach, a touch he could barely distinguish from the air. He didn't move but to breathe. And to look- down, from her face, across the round and perfect breasts, to her legs, parted in a tight v, a gradient of gold from the sun reaching through her thighs from behind. In the impossible physics of the dream, the shadow her small swollen labia cast lay directly on his penis. He felt the shadow almost had weight to it, and softness. He grew hard, his heart-beat evident, his penis thumping in the open air. When his eyes met hers again, she grinned.
