She had expected it to be dark in here, and humming with dream energy, but it dazzled with small surprises of light tucked into corners and hovering near the ceiling, and any hum of dream energy was drowned out by the bellows of her anxious lungs and the hoofbeats of her anxious heart.
The floor was dirt. Tables were crowded with papers and glasses and musical instruments. A piece of art that she didn’t like leaned against the wall. A door in the middle of the floor opened to reveal another door. A trap door hung open in midair, and on the other side of it was blue sky. Half a laptop was stacked on a phone the size of a cinder block. Opal touched nothing. Now that her heartbeat was a little quieter, the humming of the dreamthings rose to take its place. Fear wobbled inside her as she crept around and looked, her hands behind her back, her hooves scuffing dirt. This was too much like being in Ronan’s head again. Raw and formless and without rules. Walking through these dreamthings was like walking through a memory, remembering the troubled country where she had grown up.
She could tell that Ronan had not been dreaming for a long time. All of these objects were weeks and weeks old. Nothing had the persistent, loud humming of the newly dreamed. There was mostly just the dull silence of an old barn, and in the background, a watery pattering. It called her more than everything else, and so she silently wound her way through the things until she found its source.
It was a large plastic bin. She could tell that the bin itself was not dreamstuff. Its contents were. Even from the outside, the contents felt happy and sad, enormous and small, full and empty. It was like the feeling of happiness from the cloud lady on the bench, but multiplied many times over, and she knew that the feelings themselves were dreamthings. Opal had forgotten the intensity of dreamstuff. She had remembered they didn’t care about animal rules. But she had forgotten just how much.
She wasn’t sure why she lifted the lid. She would have thought she was too afraid. Afterward, she thought that she had maybe done it because she was too afraid. Sometimes bad ideas were so bad they looped right around until they became good ideas.
Her fingers trembled as she set the lid aside.
Inside the bin, it was raining.
The rustling she’d heard was the sound of the rain misting the interior over and over, collecting into big drops on the plastic sides of the bin. Occasionally thunder rumbled, low and far away. The happiness and sadness Ronan had dreamt into the rain rolled over her, and she began to cry despite herself. This was the rain for new Cabeswater, and it had been here long enough for the lid to have dust on it. He had possessed it all along and it was never the thing stopping him from dreaming his new Cabeswater. Something else must have been stopping him. This knowledge made her even happier and sadder. The feelings grew and grew in her, the sadness slowly ebbing to leave only happiness.
It was maybe this, along with the humming of the dream things, that made her whisper, “Ori! Si ori!”
She had not spoken the dream language and expected an answer for a very long time.
But the dream in the box responded. The thunder muttered and the rain hissed, and the entire rain shower lifted from the box. It rained into the box from one foot above it, then two, then four. Then Opal lifted her hands and didn’t say anything more in the dream language, just seized the rain and balled it up because she thought it would work.
It did; the rain wadded up like it was sticky, collecting into a dark clump that looked like a thunderhead.
She laughed and tossed it up in the air and caught it. When the clump bounced against the ceiling, it belched a burst of lightning that never left the cloud. She caught it with a little bump of happiness and sadness, and then she dropped it back into the bin. After a pause, she ripped off a tiny bit of the feathery wad and tucked it away in her sweater. It was okay to steal a little, she thought, because most of it was still left, and no one would know because she was not going to tell anyone she had broken the rule of coming in here. She was not going to smash the things in here. She was going to leave it like she found it.
“Be rain, okay?” she whispered to it. The cloud dissolved back into Ronan’s happy and sad rain, and she slapped the lid back on it. It had been so long since she had toyed with any dreamthings.
Opal clapped her hands and spun around, hooves scuffing in the dirt, and then she called out to the other dreamthings in the long barn.
Paper flapped to her like birds and she pinched their wings until they caught fire and then she pinched the fire until it became paper again. She smashed lightbulbs onto the ground and swept the shards into loaves of bread and then she tore the loaves open and pulled unbroken lightbulbs out of the middle. She floated on books and sang until dreamthings sang back to her. She played and she played with all of these dreamthings, knowing how to make them all do strange things, because she was an excellent dreamthing herself, and she had forgotten how wonderful a dream with nothing bad in it was.
Later Adam found her sitting at the edge of the forest. Above them the sun had slipped down behind trees and left behind knife-pink clouds. He sat beside her and together they looked out over the Barns. The fields were dotted with Ronan’s father’s sleeping cattle and Ronan’s wakeful ones. The metal roofs sparkled with newness, all of them replaced by Ronan’s new industry.
“Do you think you’re ready to tell me where all the dishes are now?” he asked.
She had handfuls of grass in each palm, but no matter what she did to them, they stayed grass. This was what it meant to be in the animal world. Rules were rules. She felt pretty wobbly, like all of the fear that she hadn’t felt in the long barn while she was playing had caught up to her.
“I’m coming back,” he said.
She tore up some more grass, but she felt a little less wobbly having heard him say it.
“I don’t want to go, but I do — does that make sense?” he asked her. It did, especially if she thought about how some of her dreamthing’s happy-sadness might have rubbed off on him because they were sitting so close. “It’s just that it’s finally starting. You know. Life.”
She leaned against him and he leaned against her, and he said, “God, what a year.” He said it with such human feeling that Opal’s love for him overwhelmed her, and so she finally gave in and took him to where she’d buried all the dishes.
“This is a big hole,” he said, as they gazed into it. It was. It was big enough to bury a trespasser or a dinnerware set for twelve. “You know, I used to think you were going to get bigger. But I think you’re full grown, aren’t you? This is the way you are.”
“Yes,” Opal said, in English.
“Sometimes the way you are is a real pain,” he added, but she could tell he said it fondly.
It felt like it was going to be okay.
But it was not okay.