The
Broken
Tail

Does the dream world continue to exist after we wake?

So many times, when she enters a dream world, she has the strange impression that she has been there before. Not the vague familiarity of a place one has once visited, but something more intimate, more disturbing: the feeling that she has lived there, that somewhere beyond the reach of waking memory an entire life has continued without her.

She never remembers at first.

Then something appears.

A person.

An event.

An object left in the corner of a room.

And suddenly she knows.

Yes.

I’ve seen this before.

I’ve lived this before.

And now I’m back.

Then she returned to this dream. It’s an ordinary home, nothing seemed unusual at first. The rooms were there. The walls were there. The quiet, familiar arrangement of things. Then, from somewhere in the corner, a tabby cat emerged, looking for food.

And suddenly she remembered.

Ah.

She has a cat in this world. 

She had forgotten her so completely, for so long, that she hadn’t fed her at all.

How long had the cat been hungry?

Days?

Weeks?

There was no way to know. Time in that world had never been trustworthy.

The cat had finally left her corner and begun searching for food herself.

And with that single sight of her, the whole history of the cat returned at once, fragments from this dream world:

She had adopted her with another cat, an orange one, just after she was born, when she was still a timid, fragile little thing.

Mimi.

That was her name.

And ever since she had brought Mimi into the house, for reasons she could no longer remember, maybe she’s been busy drifing in and out of different dream worlds, she had kept forgetting her cat.

Sometimes she remembered to feed her.

Sometimes she remembered her only after a long absence.

Sometimes, apparently, she did not remember her at all.

She had failed to give Mimi the care, the love, the attention a baby needs in order to grow into a healthy and happy soul.

So Mimi stayed in the corner.

Alone.

Quiet.

Depressed.

Waiting for something she could not have named.

Until this time, she had been forgotten for so long that she had finally been forced to come out of the corner to search for food herself.

And the girl wondered:

Does the dream world continue while she is away?

If she visits a world one night and does not return for several weeks, what happens in the dream world in the meantime?

Does she simply disappear?

Do the people in that world notice?

Do they wonder where she has gone?

Is it weeks for her but years for them?

Or perhaps only days?

And what about Mimi?

Is someone feeding her while she is gone?

Does she think she has been abandoned?

Does she wait in that corner, listening to the silence, slowly learning that the person who brought her here may never come back?

Perhaps the cruelest thing about dreams was not that they disappeared when one woke, but that they might continue without us. She thought.

Whatever the answer, she had returned to that world that morning.

And Mimi was wandering through the house, searching for food.

The sight of her brought everything back—the adoption, the forgetting, the disappearances, the long intervals between dreams, the lonely little body hiding in the corner, the wounded feeling she had never thought to ask about.

She didn’t even know anymore whether Mimi was a he or a she.

Dreams were like that.

They could make a person forget the simplest facts while preserving the deepest feelings.

She began searching the house for cat food.

But her memory was unstable.

She couldn’t remember where she had put it. Mimi watched her.

The cat had been starving. That much was obvious.

And now, after all this time, the girl had finally come back.

But she had come back empty-handed.

She could not even remember where the food was.

Something changed in Mimi.

First anxiety.

Then anger.

In the small architecture of her mind, perhaps questions were forming.

Where had you been?

Why did you bring me here?

Why did you choose me if you were going to forget me?

Why did you keep disappearing without saying goodbye?

And why, now that you have finally returned and can see that I am hungry, can you still not feed me?

The questions were too large for her little body to contain.

Her anger broke loose.

She grabbed whatever objects she could reach and threw them onto the floor. She smashed them with the furious, helpless violence of a child. 

It did not help.

She seized a small piece of furniture and hurled it at the girl.

It struck her.

But she felt no pain.

Then her mother appeared.

Or perhaps she had been there all along.

The girl suddenly remembered that while she had been away, moving between one dream and another, her mother had remained in this world.

And yet even her mother had failed to look after Mimi. 

That was when she understood that Mimi’s anger was not really about her.

Or her mother.

It wasn’t even anger, not exactly.

It was the wound left by an entire world.

A world that had never once offered her the smallest warmth since the moment she had left her mother’s body and entered this house.

A world that had allowed her to be born, to be loved for a moment, and then forgotten.

The indifference of the world had settled inside her.

It had become part of her.

And then the girl saw something lying on the floor.

Something long, soft.

At first she did not understand what she was looking at.

Then she realized.

It was Mimi's tail.

She looked closer.

Behind Mimi there remained only a short, stunted little piece.

The long tail was gone.

It lay motionless on the floor beside her.

Mimi saw it too.

And in the same instant, she seemed to remember—or perhaps understand for the first time—that she had lost her tail.

…

(Excerpt from a longer work. For the full text or to discuss publication or adaptation, please get in touch.)