Caroline wakes early on a Thursday morning to the sound of airplanes. She sits up in bed and gazes out across the canyon, beyond the acres of trees, to the airport in the distance. The sky is soft and pale blue, melting into the bay, a grayer shade of blue. The hills rise up in the distance.
A plane glides in low over the bay, arriving. In the sky, a moving pattern of lights—other planes in various states of arrival and departure. It has always been this way, as long as she can remember. Her family has always lived in the house on the canyon, and the flights have always announced the arrival of morning. The day beginning, all that industry and movement. People coming, people going. The work and play of the world. Time to get up for school.
She lays her head back down on the pillow and rolls onto her side. She wants to sleep just a little while longer. She was dreaming, she can’t remember exactly what or where. In the dream she was walking. In the dream she was alone. She had been walking for a long time and was exhausted—trying to find something, or trying to escape something? She can’t remember. She wants to go back into the dream to find out, it seems important, but of course that is impossible. Once the door shuts behind a dream, you can’t get back through.
She looks at her phone—7:10—and shuts her eyes. In a few minutes her mom will rap lightly on the. door, open it, peek in. “Good morning,” her mother will say. “Time to get up for school.”
It has always been this way, or so it seems.
This chapter four of the serial novella By the Time You Read This, a real-time experiment in tiny chapters.
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