Falling
An Uncanny Story for STSC Symposium: Flight
Shelley jolted shrieking awake with her night terrors. Simon had become used to it as a regular part of their sleeping schedule, and he pulled her close, the heat from him warming her clammy skin. She never woke up entirely, but murmured about falling from a great height. Always falling. The one time she woke up enough to sense, she cried about falling alone.
Elsewise she never remembered the dream, and they knew it as the falling dream only because of Simon’s morning reports.
A couple months after Simon turned 8, he got a skin infection. After various visits to the doctor, they found a dollar bill embedded between his epidermis and dermis. Much was made about where it came from, whether it was abuse from his parents, bullying from the schoolyard, or self-abuse, but the dollar was removed and the wound quickly healed.
Then the second bill appeared. A similar patch of infection irritated Simon awake one night, and another round of visits and paranoia ensued. Simon’s own fear and befuddlement was misapprehended as cover for the responsible party. Rumors circulated the family and few school administrators involved.
But when the third bill, and then the fourth, appeared, Simon learned to stop telling people about it, and the adults and his classmates, for their part, learned to stop looking at his condition.
They came irregularly, and never more than two at a time. They came from different parts of his skin, the first from his forearm, the second from under his left nipple, then his right leg, then one from the back of his neck. Sometimes they came wrapped around a finger, from the bottom of his foot, or his armpit. He learned to shave everywhere because the dollar bills would remove patches of hair if they shed from his scalp, his chin, his pubis.