Terrell and Diramina

Y'all been good?

* * *

I first wake up in the barn on a mild night. Mounds of cotton shuffle around me, and only when they make low bleating noises do I understand that they're sheep. It's wool. I then realize that I've never seen a sheep in person, let alone a whole flock. Herd? I'm in the pen with a group of them, and one shuffles up against me, curious.

I have no idea where I am or how I got here. I'm still in my pajamas, crumpled on the cold ground, and pull myself up to stand in.... hopefully in a clean square of hay and dirt. The sheep is now snuffling at my hand. Does it think I have food? Do sheep like being pet?

I hold my hand up with fingers together, afraid of teeth, and it pokes its nose into my palm.

"Sorry sweetheart, I got nothing but the clothes on my back."

The animal snorts and noses at my cotton shirt, then looks up at me. It's got rectangular pupils.

"I don't suppose you know where I am?"

The sheep studies me, then nudges me towards the gate. Although I feel, hear, and see literally everything, including this barn animal possibly hearing and responding to what I'm saying, I'm staying calm, because this is obviously just a dream. Obviously.

It pushes me to the edge and I climb over the wooden gate, feeling a splinter lodge into the edge of the palm of my hand. Not quite pain - my hands are too cold - but I do feel the wood shove under the skin. I strain to see it, in the calm, strong light of the moon through a nearby window I stumble to, but it's still far too dark. I see more fences, and beyond those, fields. In the other direction there's a building that could be a house. That's all I got.

Rapid bursts of barking split the air, and eventually a light comes on in front of what I now identify as definitely a house. Rustling and bleating start up behind me, and my blood runs thickly through my veins. I don't think that the person coming behind this dog can help me. I don't think they will. They're carrying a glinting rod of metal, reflecting in that same cool moonlight, in the unnerving shape of a gun. Probably to ward off whatever animal they think is trying to get at their livestock, human or not.

I feel almost distant as the dog arrives and snuffles at the barn doors. No longer barking, not even growling. Whining to be let in.

"Hush, the sheep are safe," I whisper. The whining stops, and so does the frantic shuffling. I look down at my body, and I can see through it. Everything's fading as the doors open.

...

"You doing okay?"

I open my eyes to my mother at the head of the table. Her tablet is laying on the tablecloth, and noticing that, I straighten up. You know she's concerned when she puts her iPad down.

"Yeah Ma, just tired. Didn't notice I completely knocked out."

She leans over to brush the back of her hand over my forehead. "You having trouble sleeping?"

I lean back when her hand falls, playing with the tea bag in the mint chamomile I was supposed to be drinking. "I'm okay, I just had a really weird dream last night," I explain. "Woke up in the middle of it and couldn't go back to sleep. Probably too much sugar again."

She stretches and sighs. "You know your body best. Best to listen to it and stay away from all that junk you like to eat. Let me know if you need anything to help."

I nod, wise enough not to argue. "I'mma go home and get some rest, Ma, I'd lay out on the couch but I know that's Sia's spot when she clocks out."

"Listen, go ahead if you want, but she's not even here today. No telling when she's gonna walk through the door either. She's seeing someone these days."

"Aw, Ma," I say, draping my arms over her and just breathing in the soothing scent she's carried all my life. "Hope she introduces them soon, if it's serious. We still doing dinner Thursday?"

"Always, baby girl," she says, turning to kiss my cheek.

I settle back in at home with the makings of another cup of tea and consider the insanity of that dream the night before. I still remember the ripe, rich smell of barn animals, and the blasts of cold whipping persistently at my cheeks and eyes. Did I watch anything last night to make me dream something that vivid? In the past week?

I reach to grab the clover honey from the cupboard and see something on the outer edge of my palm. It gives me pause. I turn my hand over, and there's a thin dark splinter lodged underneath the skin.

...

I stare begrudgingly at my bed, my hand damp and stinging from the thirty minute soak and persistent prying of a metal tweezer it just underwent before a thorough dousing in rubbing alcohol.

Did I sleepwalk somewhere? I'd remember. And I'm at the level of sedentary where my body would be aching if I had walked the distance required to get to any type of barn, let alone a rural area. I have no idea what to do, and I'm tired. So I lay down, completely rigid and willing myself into a dreamless sleep.

I wake up in the morning before my alarm, checking myself over for any more evidence of nightly travel or misadventures. I don't recall any memories of dark barns or friendly animals, and I feel a tentative relief. The splinter in my hand... I can't really explain that away, but stranger things have happened. Maybe time to sand down the bedraggled wooden floorboards in this house. Definitely time to put the sugary crap aside, if it's gonna treat me like that every time I indulge.

...

I'm laying down outside of the pen when I open my eyes this time. Saturday night, and I've been carrying out my normal life with no obstruction for a few weeks. The same barn, and the same sheep, this time a few of the flock easing over to the side of the pen and greeting me with bleats that sound almost welcoming.

"Hey everybody," I croak, voice crackling with sleep. It's even colder, and I don't have on as many clothes as I did the first night. I'm instantly chattering, and hoping for my body to start fading, just like the first time.

A softer bleat, and I look in its direction towards what I'm pretty sure is the same bossy sheep from before. I walk up to her and she turns halfway towards the huddle of animals, all dozing or looking lazily over at us. It looks warm.

She looks up at me and vocalizes again, softly, and I assent. "You won't tell your boss, right?"

I clamber over the gate, and she immediately takes to pushing me towards the resting flock. "Hold on, lemme get my legs under me," I gripe. My teeth are chattering.

The flock shuffles, but makes no real move around me as I find a relatively clean spot to settle. Which makes me more certain that I'm dreaming. Prey animals are easily startled, right? Do sheep even sleep laying down? This has just got to be my idea of what sleeping in a herd of sheep would be like.

My new friend settles her head across my legs, and I'm pretty much engulfed with heat, cautiously leaned up against another round back. Nice. But I can't stay here; farmers get up before the asscrack of dawn, and this man is going to be out here, right? I don't even know what time it is; could be seven at night, could be four in the morning. It's just dark.

My body doesn't care, and I feel no sense of urgency or dread. The smell of the livestock around me is near overpowering, but I'm warm and safe, for now.

...

My eyes shoot open, and I'm on my bedroom floor, smelling strongly of animals. I roll over into a sitting position. My body aches, I notice as I stand. I go to check my phone and note that the covers on my bed aren't pushed to the side or remade. There's a slight displacement of the blankets that I typically burrito in, and it looks like my body just evaporated right out of my bed.

Although that would mean that I'm not just dreaming, and actually being transported to a different place at night, randomly. I feel a niggling of hysteria at the edge of my mind, and I simply choose to ignore it. I just mark down the date in my calendar instead; three weeks after the first time. And I go about my day.

I begin sleeping with my phone in my pajama pocket at night instead of keeping it on the nightstand as an alarm clock, and instead get my old Disney castle alarm clock out of storage to wake me in the mornings. I start looking up nearby farms in the area, but everything I can find is pretty much miles away, and they don't own sheep. Not the kind I've been hanging out with, anyway. I order a night cam, but it's still in shipping when I go for the third time.

I'm on the outside of the barn this time, and I hear the sheep calling me from inside. It's pretty much pitch black, and moisture is heavy in the air. I snatch my phone out of my pocket, and the light blares in my face before I can turn down the brightness. I open the GPS, and my little blue blip.... is in the middle of a sea of green. Some roads, some sparse grey blocks that I assume are houses, like the one I can see in the distance. I zoom out, and I see that it's a small state. Or... not a state. Homei? Where is that?

"HEY!"

I drop my phone and the light disappears. The sheep are shuffling inside, and there are a few frantic bleats as I drop to my knees and scramble for my phone in the dark.

"HEY!" comes again, with excited barking. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING." There's no moon out tonight, but there are lights on in the house the man is coming from. I find my phone as my hands start fading, and shove it back into my pocket. But it's taking a much longer time than it first did. The dog comes sprinting up to me, but just bowls into me when I would've expected it to try and take me down. It looks like a fuzzy pit mix of some sort, which I think is weird for a farm dog? I wouldn't know. My stomach is churning, and I just start petting the top of its head on instinct. Its nails catch on my pants as it settles with my fingers scratching behind its ears, and I anxiously watch the man get closer.

"I don't know who you are but you can get shot, or you can leave," he calls out. He's still at a distance, but I can see he has the rifle in hand. It sounds like he's underwater, and I try to speak, but I only feel the dog's paws leave my waist as I completely fade away.

...

Why did I end up outside the barn?

That's my question for the next two weeks, racing around in my head. The last two times I showed up in the barn, almost on top of the sheep. I faded away almost immediately the first time. I have no idea how long I slept with the flock on my second trip. The third one, maybe five minutes, if that? What did the man see, if he saw me? Did he see me fading away? Did the dog just jump back down to the ground, or did my body literally lose its physical form?

During Thanksgiving break I don't have any episodes, and my cameras come in. I don't know what I'm expecting to see at night, but I set them up anyway. My search history on my phone and laptop are full of stuff that would put me on a list at this point, or at least raise some eyebrows if eyes other than my own saw it. Maybe I could visit an occult shop? Anything, literally anything, before I ask my family.

A few days before Thanksgiving I'm over at my mom's, bringing her some last minute stuff. A few boxes of cream cheese for her cake, a dozen eggs for the deviled eggs that are only going to last five minutes. Possibly because of me.

Sia is actually there for once, looking kind of tired. All that boo-loving she doing, probably. I smile at the thought. I'm listening to my mother fuss over the price of the oxtails this year when my aunt sidles in on my other side as I'm leaning over the counter.

"Now's a good time to tell us what's going on with you," she announces, sliding the chocolate chips out of one of the bags.

"Sia, I told you I'd ask her after Thanksgiving," my mother sighs.

I look over at her, apprehensive. "What's going on with me?"

"Got a deranged look in your eye," Sia explains, trying and failing to open the bag with her stubby fingernails. She slides open a drawer and starts fishing around in it, drawing out scissors.

"Ma?"

My mother slides one of the bags of tails around in its grocery bag, sighing again. "Is everything okay? I know you said you been having trouble sleeping."

Sia sucks her teeth next to me. My mom shoots her a look, but she innocently occupies herself with the handful of chocolate chips she wrestled out of the bag.

Maybe I can get some answers here? ...But if I get answers here, I probably won't like them. "Well yeah, still having trouble, but I didn't think it was showing that bad," I smile sheepishly.

"You've been mumbling to yourself a lot, and you have horrible circles under your eyes, all that good stuff," Sia says. She's barely a year older than me and, more often than not, acts more like a sister than the adopted aunt she is. Right now I'm glad she's here, because I can't just casually tell my mother I think I'm teleporting to a different country at night.

"Oh... well I..." I catch my mother's worried, open face, and my heart bumps sadly in my chest. "I've been having weird dreams lately, like I said before? And uh... I guess I can make an appointment for it, probably a real bad case of insomnia."

"What kind of dreams?" Sia demands.

I look down at her and stutter a bit. She raises an eyebrow. I take a breath. "I sleep in a barn with sheep, and the farmer runs out of his house with a rifle to come shoot me."

Her eyebrow goes back down.

"Oh my god, baby, are you okay???"

I'm pressed into a strong-armed hug, my head to my mother's chest. She pulls my face back up, her fingers wrapped around the sides of my head and making my face pucker.

"Ma? I'm fine?!" I mumble.

"Sandra, let the girl go," Sia laughs. My mother looks ready to rage, but she does as told.

"How long have you been going there?" she asks, arms crossed and hands tucked tight into her sides, leaned up against the counter just like me.

"Uh, I've been dreaming about it since that first day I started falling asleep at the table. Five weeks now? I've been keeping track."

"Only at night?"

"Yeah. Ma it's just dreams-"

"You know they're not," Sia deadpans, pouring more chocolate into her hand and rolling the edge of the bag closed. I feel cold all over.

"Come sit down D'Mina, and we can talk about it."

I follow her into the dining room and sit across from her and Sia. Sia doesn't look concerned, but my mother looks like she's about to go apeshit.

"So I'm not dreaming. How do you know?"

My mom blinks. "Just... you know your grandmother's powers are extensive, and how much she likes to meddle."

"Ma please don't tell me this is some stupid late blooming thing." I've gone my entire life believing I was perfectly safe from my grandmother's crazy line of magic. I've seen it dancing in her eyes, and every so often I've seen my mother breaking down because she can't keep her on earth for more than a moment or two.

"Not from you particularly, but maybe... maybe she hexed you when I wasn't looking? I've tested your lines over and over again, and the little that you do have wouldn't... it wouldn't do that to you. You couldn't do that."

I pause. "So I do have something in my lines?"

Her eyes look as crazy as mine have been recently. "Not like that, sweetheart, like a naturally gifted person. Nothing that would interrupt your life. But it's interrupted anyway. God."

"Wouldn't be the first match casting, Sandra," Sia says, casually. Oh fuck.

"So who is this man and why am I being transported to his farm?" My head is in my hands, and I feel my mother's hand cover mine.

"I'll ask your grandmother. But I doubt she'll tell me the purpose of the hex until you figure it out yourself. But, I know you won't be harmed," she blusters. I can tell by her voice that she's starting to cry. "I could scream."

"Go call her, Sandra, just don't say anything crazy," Sia tells my mom. This isn't the first time I've seen this exact scene play out; it just never concerned me before.

My grandmother was not allowed to be alone around me for extended periods of time until I was about fifteen. Like a dingo you can't trust with a baby. They allowed her to bless me, but all those nifty little potions and illusions she made could not cross our threshold. She'd manage to sneak some in, and I'd enjoy them and keep the secrets with her: when I was a kid, a serum to change your hair color for a day; a bit older, and I got a ward against wrinkled clothes that lasted a good week or so before I had to stop leaving my shirts balled up at the foot of my bed.

But when some bitch in the tenth grade tried to pull me out of class by my hair to fight her in the hallway one day, the ward my grandmother gave me at the beginning of the school year gave her second degree burns up both arms.

I'm not scared of my grandmother anymore, but I was for a long time after that. And thinking about what she might've cast on me without me knowing has my blood running cold.

"D'Mina."

"Hmm?"

Sia leans her elbows on the table. "Next time you go, ask him where you are."

"He told me he was going to shoot me the last time."

She shakes her head like I'm not understanding. "You fade out, right? But not until he gets close?"

I look into the kitchen, where my mother's in an indescribable state on the phone. "I think so? One time I fell asleep there."

She nods. "Ask him."

My mother walks back in, puffy-faced. "She won't tell me what it's for."

"You knew she wouldn't," Sia says. "But you know D'Mina's gonna be fine. We're all alright with her spells, even when everything goes to shit."

A curious look between the two of them, and I clear my throat.

"So what do I do?"

My mother sighs. "Just try to get some extra sleep. I'll take one of the Spring deadline projects off of you, since they're all fully planned, and you can have Fridays off, or just start coming in whenever you wake up."

"Boss' orders," Sia grins. I'm glad there's someone in the room not worried sick over what the hell my grandmother might've done.

...

I'd rather wear braces for twelve more years than go out for Black Friday, so I putter around the house, doing unnecessary chores. I do know for certain that I'm tired. I go over my mother's for the first of many subsequent days of Thanksgiving leftovers, and sprint back home to sprawl out on the couch. Somehow I know I won't get the sleep I need, and I feel dreary but unsurprised when I'm slowly brought awake by the cold and open my eyes back up to wooden slats and tufts of hay.

It's light out, at least visible with the remnants of the sun, and the sheep aren't here. I rub my hands at my eyes, sitting up sluggishly, and wonder at my disappointment. Was I expecting to sleep curled up with my friend again?

"Don't move."

I freeze, my hands just starting to come down from my eyes.

Footsteps from behind me, echoing off the walls.

"Are you gonna disappear again? Every time I get close enough to see who's running around on my property at night, you disappear into thin fucking air."

My hands are in my lap now, and I just hope he doesn't have anything resembling a weapon. Pretty sure he knows I'm unarmed.

"You talk?" The footsteps stop in front of me. Work boots. Jeans. Heavy coat, reddened hands holding gloves.

"Where am I?" I ask a chapped face, younger than the gruff tenor voice indicated and topped with a thick black mop of hair.

"In my barn, on my land," he replies snarkily. "Why are you here and who are you?"

I blink and look down at my hands. I can still see them. "Can I get up first?"

He looks me over warily, but refuses to stand down.

"The floor is cold. Everything is cold, but uh... I'm on the floor."

He nods and I rise, coming up a couple inches short of his height. "Strange to be traipsing around with no regard for the weather."

I stare blankly at him, just about done with him only on the first true encounter. "Look at me, I don't even have shoes on. You know as well I do that I don't choose to come here."