By John Swartz

It was after his doctor gave the old man bad news that he and his wife started sharing their dream over morning coffee. His dreams, then, were even darker than they had been before his diagnosis, full of dead relatives and obscure threats. Hers were of dolphins leaping into her arms and dancing with old friends. The sharing brought a new intimacy. Perhaps it was just pseudo-intimacy, since it was based on dreams and a dream, is after all not real. But real or not, pseudo or not, he would take what he could get.

He toned down the terror of his dreams in the telling, so as not to disturb her. And she, he was sure, made her dreams seem a bit less enchanting than they actually were. They each modified the truth – if a dream can be called a truth – just a bit, just enough to make it a little easier on the other.  

The sharing was one of the little things that connected him to a life that was ebbing away. It was a time when lasts were looming: the last encounter with the obnoxious brother-in-law, the last doctor’s visit, the last whiff of cinnamon toast. And he expected that all too soon she would be giving him their last kiss.

The morning he threatened to survive the winter just to annoy her, she laughed him off and went out to Walgreens to get his meds. When she was late returning, he guessed she was in some long conversation with a total stranger on the street; the kind of thing that had made her late before. Then he got the call: a stroke. 

On the way to her room in the hospital his feet seemed to sink into the floor tiles; it was all so unreal, but it really was her on the bed, the sunken eyes were the very ones that had rolled at him when he teased her, the lips were the very ones that smiled her forgiveness the times he wronged her.  

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but he was the one who gave the last kiss.The shock almost did him in – and he almost wanted to be done in — but arrangements had to be made, his daughters’ flights for the service had to be coordinated. . . 

After a while the neighbors stopped bringing over casseroles and people stopped calling.       

Spring arrived, and much to his surprise, and not entirely to his liking, he found himself still alive. One morning he woke up feeling surprisingly well. He took his first walk in months. He went to MacDonalds and got a greasy, salty meal, the kind she would have forbidden him to eat. He could practically hear her scolding and laughing, bringing happy memories with her. How was it possible, with his missing her so much, he could feel anything remotely like joy? But he did. It must have been last night’s dream that put him in such a good mood. He tried hard to recall it and after a while it came to him, vividly. But it was not his dream. He recognized it as one of hers: they were ice skating on a summer night so close to a carousel that they could hear the music.

*   *   *

John Swartz grew up in a large boisterous Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia and spent summers with a Mennonite family in Lancaster County, PA. This experience led to his ongoing fascination with the humor and pain associated with culture clashes. He joined the Navy as a journalist seaman and wrote many articles for newspapers around the country. A long-time lover of theater, John worked briefly as an actor in San Francisco, but discovered he preferred writing plays to acting in them. After settling in Vermont, John wrote reports for criminal and family court that gave him an intimate view of the human drama behind every case. He currently writes decisions as an independent arbitrator for the Vermont Commissioner of Family Services. John’s most recent published work was a feature article in the Valley News of Lebanon NH, and a piece in The Sun magazine. He has completed a novel that is searching for an agent and another under development.