The Dream She Could Not Share Whole

The dawn arrived without confidence. Its light pressed through Violet's curtains as a grey wash that softened the room's familiar surfaces without warming them — the posters reduced to pale rectangles, the desk to a dark shape, the clock's red digits still glowing with the authority of a mechanism that had measured every minute since 2:43 AM, when the nightmare had released her and the waking had begun.

Violet had not returned to sleep. She had sat with the lamp on through the remaining hours, her knees drawn to her chest, the images from the dream maintaining their resolution with a fidelity that ordinary dreams did not possess. At some point before the light changed she had risen, dressed in jeans and a shirt with the mechanical movements of someone whose body was performing tasks her mind had not specifically authorised, and pulled her hair back from her face with fingers that had steadied since the initial trembling but that still carried a fine vibration she could feel when she pressed them together.

The decision to tell Jasmine had formed during the dark hours. Not all of it — the full architecture of the nightmare, with its pursued flight and its gaol rising from the desert and the hand reaching for her shoulder, belonged to a category of experience she could not deposit in her fourteen-year-old sister's keeping without accepting responsibility for the damage it would cause. But fragments, selected and softened, stripped of their most lacerating edges — these she could offer. The act of sharing, even in edited form, would loosen the dream's grip on her own mind whilst giving Jasmine enough truth to satisfy the awareness she already possessed that something had happened in the night.

Down the hall, the Dallow household was stirring into its morning sequence. Robert had departed for the early shift — his footsteps across the floorboards, his keys, the front door's careful closure — all conducted in the predawn dark with the habitual stealth of a man whose schedule preceded his family's waking. Evelyn's alarm had not yet sounded, but the particular quality of silence from the master bedroom suggested she was approaching consciousness, the sewing room and its waiting Singer pulling at her even through the last minutes of rest.

Jasmine's alarm buzzed from across the hallway with the muffled insistence of a mechanism buried beneath a pillow. The sound — so ordinary, so reliably domestic — struck Violet's strained nerves with a sharpness that the device's modest volume did not warrant. She rose from her bed, smoothed her palms against her jeans in a gesture that was less about the fabric's creases and more about the need for her hands to perform a purposeful action, and crossed the corridor.

Her knock was soft. Jasmine's response was the groggy murmur of a girl whose body was negotiating the transition from sleep to wakefulness with the reluctance that fourteen-year-olds brought to the process. Violet pushed the door open.

Jasmine sat amongst her covers with her shoulders hunched and her eyes still carrying the residue of whatever benign territory her own dreams had occupied. Her hair tangled around her face in the morning disorder that represented her one concession to chaos, the rest of her room maintaining the orderly arrangement that characterised everything she touched. The light from the window caught her hair and haloed it in gold, and the effect made her look younger than fourteen — made her look, for a moment, like the child she was ceasing to be and that Violet was increasingly aware of needing to protect from the things that childhood was not designed to contain.

Jasmine saw her sister's face and the half-smile she had been assembling from sleep dissolved into something more attentive. The observation was immediate and accurate — Violet looked awful — and it arrived with the unguarded directness that Jasmine employed before the day's social calculations had fully engaged.

Violet perched on the edge of the bed. The springs dipped beneath her weight, drawing her closer to Jasmine in the way that the mattress's age and softness always did, a physical proximity that the furniture facilitated regardless of whether the conversation required it. The room smelled of fabric softener and the chalky sweetness of Jasmine's soap, scents so specific to this space and this person that they produced in Violet a pang of tenderness that threatened to capsize the composure she was attempting to maintain.

She told Jasmine about the dream.

The account she delivered was shaped with the care of someone constructing a garment from fabric that contained both usable material and portions that needed to be cut away. She described the Outback — endless, red, stripped to its essence beneath a sun that would not move. She described the loneliness — the sense of standing in a landscape so vast that it reduced her to insignificance. She described the running — the dust in her throat, the heat on her skin, the birds whose cries carried across the empty sky.

She did not describe the gaol. She did not describe the footsteps behind her, their deliberate rhythm, their terrible patience. She did not describe the hand that had reached for her shoulder in the moment before waking, the touch that had not quite landed but whose proximity had been sufficient to produce a scream that tore through two layers of consciousness before emerging into the air of her bedroom at 2:43 AM.

These she kept. The editing was not dishonesty but calibration — the selection of what could be shared without transferring the weight that the full account would impose. Violet understood, with the instinct of an older sister who had been managing the boundary between protection and inclusion for fourteen years, that Jasmine could receive fear without being damaged by it. What Jasmine could not receive — not yet, not at fourteen, not with the Silverton camp approaching — was the specific quality of the nightmare's final moments, the particular horror of pursuit that ended not in escape but in the pursuer's arrival.

Jasmine listened with the focused stillness that characterised her reception of everything important. She did not interrupt. She did not fidget. She held the account in her attention the way she might hold a fragile object — carefully, with both hands, aware that its value was connected to its vulnerability. Her eyes widened at certain moments and narrowed at others, the dream's imagery producing visible responses that tracked its emotional contour even in the absence of its most extreme features.

The room held the story between them when Violet's voice trailed away. The quiet that followed was not empty but occupied — filled with Jasmine's processing, her assessment of what she had heard against what she suspected she had not heard, her calibration of concern against the reassurance her sister's physical presence provided.

Jasmine asked whether the dream was connected to Sally Harlow and everything that had been happening. The question arrived with the particular precision of someone who had been assembling fragments for days — the newspaper, the overheard conversations, the changes in Violet's behaviour, the night when their father had shouted about the rainbow man — and who was now testing whether the dream represented another fragment or the pattern into which the fragments might fit.

Violet hesitated. The truthful answer was yes. The safe answer was no. The answer she gave occupied the territory between: she did not know. It might mean something or it might not. It was just a dream. The qualifications stacked upon one another like sandbags against a rising waterline, each one individually reasonable and collectively insufficient.

Jasmine received this with a nod that was slow enough to communicate scepticism without openly challenging the deflection. She had learned — was learning — that her sister's evasions were not refusals of trust but acts of protection, and that the distinction, whilst meaningful, did not eliminate the frustration of being the person from whom information was being withheld for her own good.

She asked Violet to be careful. The request was the same one she had made at the front gate two days earlier, during the walk home from the Outback, and its repetition indicated not that Jasmine had forgotten making it but that the circumstances had escalated sufficiently to require its renewal. Her voice was small. The weight in it was not.

Violet pulled her sister close. The embrace was fierce — the kind of contact that communicated what verbal reassurance could not, the physical declaration that the person holding you intended to remain present regardless of what the world was assembling against them. She breathed the scent of Jasmine's hair — shampoo, sleep, the particular warmth that her sister's body generated — and pressed a promise into the moment that she intended to honour and suspected she might not be able to.

They separated. Violet smoothed Jasmine's hair with a gesture that borrowed from Evelyn's maternal vocabulary — the touch that said I am here, I am watching, I will not let you carry this alone — and let the pretence of composure reassemble itself across her features. The pretence was imperfect. Jasmine's eyes lingered, searching for the reassurance the smile offered and the confirmation the eyes withheld.