I pushed the door shut behind me, leaving me in a simple, evenly lit room with no windows, with pink and white wallpaper and a smiling chair. Everyone was eating marshmallows somewhere else, I just wanted to think. Looking sideways at the smiling chair, watching over me, making sure I didn’t get hurt somehow, I sat on the floor. I ran my fingers through the red carpet and felt my fingernails lengthen. I felt my hair grow, as the chair smiled calmly into my eyes. I finally saw the plastic toy teapot on the shelf. This was a bedroom, I saw. I looked at my hands and the skin on my arms… smoother, softer, somehow far more realistic, more believable.
The teapot had two faces.
I woke to the sound of a kettle being loudly filled with a bucket of water. The room was dark, lit by two wilting candles. The walls were wooden, the floor was covered in thin rugs spun in warm tones. The candlelight was yellow, and cast big shadows.
"Gigi?"
She jumped slightly, and put down the heavy cast iron kettle on the electric oven. "Child! Why are you awake now?"
"You woke me."
"Oh," she turned and looked me up and down. "Well, put on some clothes, my dear; it's cold in here."
I pulled the old, dusty thick covers of the cot off of me, and found that she was right. I walked to the closet and pulled on my huge chore coat over myself, and moved to sit at the old circular wooden table. I watched Gigi make breakfast as the sun shone on the thick curtains of the window. The birds were silent today.
"Child?" Said Gigi.
I was twenty-two, but I looked up.
"Did you have one of your dreams last night?"
I looked into her eyes, as she slowly turned down the heat of the stove. She was looking back, with a look on her face that made me wonder several things.
"I did." I had never told anyone about my dreams.
She nodded. "I had one about you, too."
I listened to the wind in the trees outside, how the trees sung as they swayed, and the cicadas, the most fearless of creatures, sang. The cast-iron kettle began to bubble slowly with it's thick broth as I breathed slowly.
"What about me?"
"You didn't look like… *this,"* she said, waving a hand before me. "You looked very much different."
I kept looking into her eyes; my hands were damp as they clasped.
"Our dreams know more about us, than we do, child."
She poured me hot soup, and taught me to become my dreams.
Gigi was the author's grandmother's name.
The main character is not the author.
The marshmallows are meaningful, as is everything else, at least to someone.