The swamp where the worlds meet is a very dangerous place. Under the muddy water’s surface, lurk monsters that if dreamed of, could wake a demon from his deepest slumber. Betwixt the shadows of drooping Spanish moss and twisting vines, live the nastiest of all malicious and vicious pixies.

But she was safe inside her little house on stilts. She had hung herbs over doorways and anointed the thresholds with oils for protection, but that wasn’t the only reason she was safe. There was something about her new friend that made the swamp things skittish.

Before, the pixies might have come up to her window and made faces at her and her nurses. But the nurses were gone, her baby too, and now the pixies and sprites peeped in for only a second before slithering away.

The pixies now weren’t even touching the sweetcakes she left out on her front steps as an offering to them. They were shunning her because of her new visitor. There was something about him they didn’t like.

Her new friend couldn’t stay with her long if she was going to make the swamp her home. The spirits might have been leaving the offerings alone out of fear, but if it went on for too long they would leave her offerings untouched as a sign of rejection. Her new friend’s ominous pall would have them both shunned, and being shunned from the place she had been shunned to was more than she could bear to think about.

But her new friend was kind and helpful. He helped around the house, and gave her plenty of space. She did the same for him. It was as if they both were ghosts, habitually moving around the house, sliding unnoticed past each other, lost inside their own memories.

Every now and again, she would stop to cry, and he would become quiet with whatever work he was doing. He would never say a word. He would just check on her with his eyes, and if hers ever met his, he’d give her a sympathetic smile. But she never spoke about her tears, and she was happy he didn’t ask.

Then at night, he would try not to sleep. He’d fumble and fidget throughout the night, trying to stay awake. At times, she would think about saying something, but when he did fall asleep, sitting in the chair by the fire, it didn’t take but a few short minutes for nightmares to set upon him. Sometimes he’d thrash and wake himself up. It always took him a few moments to regain a sense of where he was.

She’d give him a sympathetic smile, and he would gesture for her to go back to sleep.

One morning when he was collecting wood for the fire, she made herself busy with her herbs and her oils, and when he returned, she presented a small dark jar to him.

“For your nightmares,” she said, while he was stacking the small logs and sticks by the fireplace.

He eyed the jar and stood, holding out his hand. She placed it in his palm.

He asked in an unhuman voice, “Do I drink it?”

She shook her head, raised her hands to her temples, and demonstrated where to anoint himself with it. He mirrored her circular movements as she moved her fingers to the soft flesh behind her ears, then her wrists, then her forehead.

“Thank- I mean, I appreciate it.” The customs of this world did not abide by the words thank you and sorry, because people often do not mean those words when they say them.

He nodded and set the tincture on the fireplace mantle.

He also wanted to apologize for disturbing her sleep with his night terrors, but he went back to work, restacking the kindling before going out for more.

When he stepped out the door, he stopped on the porch. On a small china plate, which was the finest thing she owned, there still sat the two sweetcakes. She made them fresh every night as an offering to the swamp.

He knew he couldn’t stay long. The memories coming back to him told him this was his way, and he needed to be getting on.

That night, he anointed himself with the oils as he sat in his chair before the embers in the fireplace.

“Dream well,” The Swamp Witch said.

He nodded, “You too.”

She rolled away to face the wall, and he took a steadying breath before closing his eyes.

***

Our hero was suspended from a rope secured to something beyond the open skylight.

“Hurry up, Mate! Don’t just hang there!”

Our hero pulled himself up and released the clip holding his safety harness to the rope. They were in a marble ballroom. All around the room were pedestals holding empty glass cases, and each case was lit. Aside from the lit cases and the red lasers crisscrossing the room, it was dark.

“What is this?” Our hero asked the man in the leather coat.

The man was shadowed in the dark hallway on the other side of the red laser beams. “It’s the opposite of a heist.” The Dream King lit up a cigarette, “Come on.”

In his dream, our hero was normal. He had no scars and no piercings of servitude. He was young but not a child. He was healthy and fit.

He examined the red lasers, and mapped out a path under this one, over that one.

Matrix, limbo, back flip, arabesque, half-moon pose, pin drop, cart-wheel, and he stuck the landing.

The Dream King looked at him with wide eyes through the haze of his lit cigarette.

“You know those weren’t activated right?”

All the red lines across the showroom faded.

Our hero blinked, “And you’re just telling me this now?”

“Because, that was fucking awesome, Mate! You were like this, and then you did that-” Hypnos excitedly mimicked his moves as they made their way down the darkened hall. “And then what the fuck was this thing? Are you a ballerina or something?”

He nodded, “I lived with one.” Our hero stopped. “Hang on, I just remembered that…” His eyes drifted out a window towards the purple sky, dripping with falling stars.

“Yeah. You’re dreaming, so this is where all the things you left alone in your subconscious come to run amuck. It’s to be expected your memories are all out of sync. My buddy, well, kind of my boyfriend, but not really, he can’t remember any of the time we spent together in Tartarus.” He resumed walking and our hero followed.

“You’ve been in Tartarus? You got out?”

“Not exactly. Just… you’re not the only one I sprang from the joint… but, if anyone asks, I had nothing to do wiffit!”

Our hero blinked, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Hypnos pointed his cigarette at him, “Good. Because you won’t remember anything when you wake up anyway. Hey, sorry I wasn’t there when you got out. I meant to be, but I was at this rave, you see, and things got a little-” He wiggled his fingers around his temples.

“We’re not supposed to use that word here. Sorry.”

“Not unless you mean it, and I do mean it. Here we go.” Dream approached a door and held his hand over the handle until the pins and tumbler clicked, and the door swung open.

They walked into an office with dark, rich wood shelves lining the walls. It smelled of scotch and decaying paper. There was a large wooden desk on the opposite side of the room.

Hypnos unlocked the desk drawer the same way he unlocked the door. He dug through his pockets until he withdrew a black velvet bag.

He saw our hero’s curious expression and poured out the contents, which were tiny black gemstones in tear dropped shapes, into his hand.

“What are they?”

“The tears of my brother.” Hypnos said.

“He cries rocks?”

“No. His tears turn into rocks.”

“Ah… got it.”

“And these,” Hypnos looked dejectedly at them as he moved them around in his palm, “are all the tears he’s ever cried.”

Hypnos funneled them back into the bag.

Our hero cleared his throat. “Ever?”

There were only twenty-some odd stones in the pouch.

“Ever.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah… he um…” Hypnos tossed the pouch into the drawer, and kicked the drawer closed. “He has a problem with his emotions. He’s been looking for those. So, I thought I’d give them back… He’s going to need them. We often call a man cold when he is really just sad.”

Our hero thought for a minute about the quote, “Longfellow?”

“Who? What? I’m talking about my brother, Thanatos. Pay attention.”

“Right, my apologies.”

Hypnos nodded back towards the entrance, “Now that that’s all said and done… and you’re a free man… We should get a drink!”

Hypnos opened the office door, but instead of the marble hall, they entered the graffitied back hall of a bar. The walls were littered with torn black and white posters, and it smelled like sour-boozy vomit.

Hypnos yelled over the pulses of an electronic beat, “I bet you’re a whiskey man. Me too. Thanny drinks scotch, though.”

“Um… question. I mean I have several, but…”

Hypnos turned to him, and our hero pointed at his own face. “Do I still look eleven years old?”

Hypnos looked him up and down. He yelled, “You look fine,” and he walked into the bar.

Our hero pressed his lips together and said to himself, “Not what I asked.” He followed the Dream King anyway.

They slid into a booth, which already had a bottle of Jack Daniels waiting for them. “You know you can be whatever age you want, right? You’re free now. You get to start anew, do whatever you like, whenever you like.”

“I don’t know if that’s really what freedom means.”

“How would you know?”

“Good point.”

“Listen, I’m free, and let me tell you what- I can smoke, I can dance, I am a free agent. I make me own rules, and there’s one rule here in Dream: There are no rules!”

The ex-Jinni smiled and leaned back, “But that’s still a rule.”

“So?” Hypnos took a swig of whiskey straight from the bottle.

“You’re essentially asking me what it is I want.”

Hypnos handed him the bottle, “Yeah. What do you want?”

Our hero sighed and looked around the bar for his answer. He noticed the patrons of the bar were all people he vaguely recognized. There were two demons smoking and drinking at the bar. There was a scruffy waiter practicing different accents on the people he served, and a woman in a Victorian dress talking about humanities with an interior designer from Cali, and a fisherman from Canada. There was a fairy prince arm wrestling with the undefeated champion at a corner table.

Everywhere he looked, he saw different people from different points in his life, spinning around the room in a whirlwind of memory and colors. He took a swig from the bottle, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want to remember.”

The orphans of Carpathia walked into the bar with wide eyes and ragged clothes.

“I want to forget,” he said.

An old Sage held out his glass as a ballerina poured wine into it from a red perfume bottle.

“In order to be free I must be free from my past. I can’t- I don’t want to remember this.” His fingers were pulling through the hair he knew he didn’t have. He ripped them out of his hair, and shook from the mental strain of differentiating reality from dreams and memories forgotten.

Hypnos pulled the bottle of Jack back to his end of the table, “I know you’ve only had a sip, but I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

Our hero laughed, “What about being able to do whatever I want, huh?” He stole the bottle back and drank deep.

“You know…” Hypnos cautioned, “in the future, you tell me you can’t run away from your past, and that a strong man can face his weaknesses.”

“Yeah, but I’m tired of always being responsible for my own sanity! I’m tired of being strong! For holding it together when there is nothing to hold onto! I know nothing but pain and loss, and I have told myself lie after lie to keep myself sane… to survive! I can’t. If I get to start over… then I’m going to start over. You are certainly right when you say, I won’t remember any of this when I wake up.”

He took one more drink, and the fire inside him brought him to his feet.

“Wait, don’t leave yet!” Hypnos reached for him.

But he was gone.

“Shit.” Dream brought the booze back to his side of the table, as he sat in an empty and silent bar.

***

Our hero awoke to the sound of the Swamp Witch coming through the door with firewood. He rubbed his face, then his bald head as he groaned, trying to recall the mess of faces he saw in his dream. He turned to her and she smiled.

“I thought I’d let you sleep,” she said. “Did you have bad dreams?”

He thought and said, “I don’t remember, but I did have an epiphany.”

“Oh?” She crouched down to set the wood next to the fireplace.

He leaned forward in his chair, as she stopped to listen.

“If-if you could forget everything, would you?”

She took in a deep breath, and her eyes drifted across her tiny house. “Parts. I’d want to forget parts, but not everything.”

“Why?”

She swallowed and stood.

“I want to remember… so that maybe I can keep it from ever happening again.”

He thought about this and nodded.

“And my life wasn’t bad. There were good parts, and I cherish those memories.” Tears began to well up in her eyes as she wrapped her arms around her chest. “I still love my daughter. I still love my sisters, and I don’t want-,” she swallowed, and her lip trembled. Then anger strained in her throat, “but, I don’t want that man to take more from me than what he stole. I won’t allow him to take everything from me.” Her head fell, but she took in a breath.

She laughed despite herself, “Why do you ask?”

He bit his tongue, and shook his head. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have…”

She moved to the work table behind him. “Are you going to forget everything?” She looked back at him.

He thought for a moment and turned in the chair to face her. “Yes.”

She nodded and sniffed, “Well I hope that works out for you.”

He wasn’t sure if she meant it. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t.

Her face softened, and she asked, “Do you need help?”

He did have magick of his own, though it was sporadic. Sometimes it would fizzle away like a weak firework. Other times it worked seamlessly and would come as naturally to him as breathing.

He smiled, “I’d like that very much.”

She turned to her table and took inventory of her jars of oils and herbs. “We’ll need a few things.”

“I’ll get the fire and breakfast started,” he offered.

The Swamp Witch looked over her shoulder at him. She had a million thoughts in her mind, and she decided to leave them there. She opened the door and descended the stairs into the swamp.

She returned an hour later with a basket of ripe, fresh fruit and a jar of swirling glitter. Our hero raised an eyebrow at the jar.

“Pixie dust.” She answered his questioning gaze.

He arched his eyebrow further, “And how did you manage that?”

“A witch doesn’t reveal her secrets.” She wagged a finger.

“And how is it going to help? I just think happy thoughts and fly to the second star to the right?”

She stiffened. “Where I’m from, we use pixie dust for a number of glamours. Pixie dust tricks and distracts. It will help you blend into the world by hiding your scars.”

He nodded.

She continued, “...and the fairy food,” she looked at her basket of fruit, which made his breakfast of swamp fish stew look even more sickly, “it will help you forget, just like the Lost Boys of Neverland.”

“Then I will do what I can to change my-,” he looked down at his hands, “shape, and to lock away the memories that keep surfacing, and this will do the rest?”

She nodded and stepped forward, “Are you certain this is what you want?”

He took a breath. “Yes.”

She raised her chin and set down her basket of fruit on the table. “I appreciate your friendship and what you’ve done for me. I wish you luck.”

He cringed, but couldn’t put his finger on why.

She said, “But I warn you, we will meet again.”

He smiled. “I don’t doubt that.”