Back Across the Rubicon: Eight From the Land of No Return

"Ah-lai-nneh-sheian!" I woke up calling this, whatever it means. My throat felt like I had been yelling all of the day before while riding on roller coasters. I groped for the glass of water on my bedside table, but it was empty. I was always too lazy to refill it at night.

Then I noticed my kid brother pulling at the sheet in his annoying, little-brother way. Yanking it little by little, as though I wouldn't notice. I threw back the sheet with one rough tug, discovering the giggling bundle beneath the mass of material.

"Ah-lai-nneh-sheian!" He chirped in retaliation. Then after a second he tried to attack my face with a pillow. Typically obnoxious, the little twerp. I relieved him of the pillow and held his wrists fast.

"You'll pay for that, rodent." I threatened, and then I pushed him away.

"What's an Ah-lai-nneh-sheian, anyway?" Jason persisted, grabbing my arm as I got up so that he hung from it like a pendulum. "Some monster or something?"

"No," I said emphatically, but what did the little brat know, anyway? Jason was only eight, less than half my age, and still scared of the dark, so I'd once made the mistake of allowing him to sleep in my room. Now I couldn't seem to get rid of him. He snuck in every night to sleep by me. But I'd be going away to college soon, so I let him.

He'd brought up an interesting question, though. What was Ah-lai-nneh-sheian? I couldn't seem to remember while I was awake.

And I knew that meant it was something important. Dreams, you see, had become my specialty.

*****

Now I'll admit something I've never admitted to anyone. I am not at all what I seem. Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder who the hell that is. No one in my high school would ever imagine that I believe in visions. I'm not the type. What type am I? Tall enough to play basketball and short enough to be the running back for our football team. I've got blond hair that the girls like right now, but sometimes I worry that my blond hair might thin or go gray early. My eyes are brown, darker even than my little brother Jason's. He's half African-American and has the clearest honey-colored skin you've ever seen and big greenish-brown eyes. His eyes grab people's attention-luminous and paler than the eyes of most racially mixed kids. Jason is actually my half-brother, you see, but I never think of him as anything less than 100% my brother. I even like his mother, my step-mother Lorraine. There's no law against liking your step-mom, you know.

What happened to my mother? My mother is why I believe in the visions.

Because the one time when I didn't, something awful did happen.

My mother died.

All the time, I knew she was sick. The visions about her came not long after Ken left. For nearly a year they were telling me that she had some kind of disease, but I shut them out. I was eight years old. What eight year old wants to see visions of his beloved mother in agony, dying, leaving him forever?

So many times I have felt guilty about it, and I wonder-if I had told her to see a doctor, would they have caught the disease in time before it spread to other organs, to her brain? Because once cancer has spread to the brain, there really isn't any hope. They say there is, but that's just to make you struggle to hang on longer. My mother believed she had a chance. And she died within the year.