Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? The transient pleasures as a vision seem, And yet we think the greatest pain's to die. ~John Keats

“They said I wouldn’t dream, but I did – I dreamed about my family.”

The warehouse is dim, full of unmarked crates and unspecified rustlings that would have unsettled someone less desperate. Tracey is willing to force suspicious feelings out of his mind in order to concentrate on the larger concern of his impending death. Would he see a bright light? Would there be angels, or were those only for the kind of death you weren’t meant to wake from?

Would the angels tell him the bad men will stop coming?

A man with dirty fingernails clutches a syringe. Tracey doesn’t know his name – that’s part of the deal.

“You will lie down now,” says the man with a heavy accent. He looks like the sort of doctor you’d pay not to see you.

“Should I close my eyes?”

“I do not care, just so long as you do not struggle when it is time.”

Tracey closes his eyes. It makes him think of dying in a bed, as an old man, and that idea is simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

“Will I dream?"

"No." That is the last word he hears.

Without warning, the needle plunges into his arm. The pain surprises him, even though there was no conciliatory “you’ll only feel a prick.” Maybe he imagined one.

Another man’s heart beats uncontrollably in his chest. Through the translucent skin of his eyelids he is aware of the dim light being eclipsed; he hears a muffled snap, like he’s listening through balls of cotton, as the top of his coffin is secured. He wants to scream. He needs to tell the doctor that there’s been a mistake, that he’s still awake, but he can’t open his lips or drag his tongue between his teeth.

He remembers, all in a flash, the haunting stories during the war, of men and women who were mistakenly buried alive among the hordes of dead soldiers. Man should never see the inside of his own coffin, Sergeant Reynolds had said. That’s why so many in the infantry carried a small vial of poison around their necks. The Sarge had never done that. It ain’t God’s way to die afore He chooses you, he had said.

Tracey wonders if he’ll go to the forest of pain in Hell for what he’s doing now, or if damnation is only for suicides that are meant to last.

He inhales slowly, but it’s hard, like he’s breathing through a bog. He wants to rattle out one more breath before he dies, but his lungs are arrested midway through exhalation, and he hovers a wisp above extermination.

There is no time. There is only darkness.

And the darkness is punctured by an illumination, a soft glowing beacon in the shape of a crescent moon.

His nightlight. He remembers.

He gazes at it through the bars of his bed railing. Mammy shuffles through his door in her old-person slippers and her grandmammy robe. He’s gripping the bed railing and she puts her wrinkled hand on his – soft, strong, smelling like cherries and almonds. Warmth and comfort flows through him instantly.

“You go back to sleep now, tadpole. Ain’t nothin’ but bad dreams and fairy dust.”

Tracey huffs under his blanket. It's blue and it has red dinosaurs on it.

“I hit the railin’. Woke me outta it.”

“That’s what it’s there for,” grandmammy says. “So you don’t hit the floor.”

“There was a swampy thing after the fam’ly. An’ Billy’s boys was there too, chasing me so’s I couldn’t warn a soul.”

“They still givin’ you trouble?”

“I’m givin’ it right back, Mammy.”

“That’s my boy. Gotta be strong, don’t let no one push you about. You’re a smart kid. Gonna go places.”

“Yes, Mammy,” Tracey sighs.

“Now don’t you forget it. We take care for you, always will. Look here. You roll outta your bed when the bad dreams come, so your daddy builds this rail for you ‘til you grow big enough not to roll outta bed.”

“I know,” groans Tracey. He wishes he was big enough already.

“And you get into scrapes with the boys at school, so we got this here attic what you can always climb to an’ be alone. Important for young folks your age.”

“Yes, Mammy,” Tracey chants. He hates being talked at like he’s some eight-year-old. He’s ten already and he doesn’t like being called “young folks.”

“Now you listen. The point o’ it is you gotta know there’s always a safe place for you here. It’s a big ‘verse an’ we lost your mamma to it. It’s God’s way; He wanted her back, so He took her from us. But He don’t like folks leavin’ afore their time. That’s why we build a place for each other, a place for family.” She draws a locket out from her large, shapeless bosom. “A place you fit snug, just as snug as your mamma in this charm here.”

Tracey has seen inside it before, he knows that the picture of his mamma is nestled in there so perfect it was like the locket was made just to hold her image, in exactly the same way this house was built just to hold his family.

Mammy leaves him with a wet kiss on the brow that he wipes off with embarrassment before she makes it out the door. He lies back with a sigh. The sloping wall of the attic presses against him on one side and the rail of the bed pens him in on the other. His breath quickens and he remembers what his nightmare had really been about.

His mamma’s face before they closed the lid.