The Dream Catcher

Janie was screaming in her bed, blood curdling, and paint peeling screams that were like fingers on a chalkboard to her Mom.  The doorbell rang and standing in the pouring rain was a balding male, glasses of dark lenses he never said anything pushed his way in the house gently moving Mom out of the way.  She was frightened there was something she sensed that told her to let him go.

He entered Janie’s room hearing her scream he put a hand on her forehead.  He could feel the pain enter his body just before he vanished from the house.  He woke up in a darkened house with a fat man tying him to a radiator in a dank basement.  The man was breathing heavy and zipping up his pants as he watched the crying child tied to the radiator struggle to get free unable to utter a sound.

The pain the throat felt made it hard to utter anything more than a slight sobbing sound as tears ran down the face soaking the torn shirt the child was wearing.  As the man turned to walk away, the chain released and the catcher grabbed him by the throat with the chain strangling the life out of him as he was suddenly struggling to utter a sound.  Janie was now free of the nightmares that had been haunting her for two years.

Jimmy was sitting in the padded room begging for mercy from God from the pain he was still feeling.  Not the physical kind but the emotional kind that he was unable to speak of no matter how many times the VA shrinks ask.  Two years of the same questions were forcing him to feel silence and give them nothing but quiet silence. 

One Friday night they found him pounding his head on the floor blood gushing from his forehead but he did not stop even after they shot him full of Thorazine.  In the morning, a man no one recognized asked to see Jimmy he was wearing dark glasses and looked official so no one asked any questions.

The man sat quietly with Jimmy as he mumbled incoherent babble the staff was trying desperately to record to no avail.  Within in moments Jimmy was calm and peaceful, the man got up, and walked away never to be seen nor heard from again, Jimmy was released just a week later.

You could hear screams and bullets flying everywhere as the blast shook the Humvee knocking it sideways.  A twenty-year-old lay in the backseat not moving, curled up as a small boy would in fear afraid to move.  His friends were being killed as they fought back while he did nothing to help.  By the time the enemy realized he was alive the rescue team arrived and killed or injured the enemy; no one realized he had not fought back because he was the only survivor.  He had injuries that required him to be discharged only weeks later sustained in the blast.  When anyone asked about the attack, he never admitted he was a coward, as his friends lie dyeing.

He spent months in his apartment living on his service-connected pension, drinking himself to death when an old friend finally found him crying on is balcony, a 9mm in his hand loaded and cocked leaving him in the mental ward at the local VAMC reliving his pain repeatedly afraid to admit his cowardice for two years.

The dream catcher moves from place to place, town to town taking on the pain of others to free them as penance for his own misdeeds years before.  His name was JC Marks, born in a small town in the Midwest no one had ever heard of.  He served in the military as a radioman during the First Gulf War in the rear between burying men and women he did not know that left his mind broken.

In his pain, his broken mind made choices either that left others dead, by his drunken driving or when he tried to set himself on fire in a drunken self-loathing rage that killed an entire apartment complex including him.  Wherever he wound up in his death, he was set to replace the previous dream catcher to take upon others pain until his soul was recovered to allow him to find his own peace in his death.