The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin

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content warning for sexual assault

Dream Sequence

In my dream life, I walk up a moss-covered spiral
staircase to the top of an opalescent tower. I'm a
princess in my dream life, there's a white owl with a flat 
face perched on my shoulder who coos cliches in my 
ear. Shoot for the moon, the owl says, even if you miss 
you'll land among the stars. In my real life, there are 
glow-in-the-dark stars attached to my ceiling fan and 
a spider stuck weaving a web between the glass of my 
bedroom window and its screen. I go to school, and I'm 
not a princess. I have a dog that my family found skinny, 
starving, tied to a tree. Nothing flies. In my dream life, I 
catch my teeth in a bloody pile in my hands, and that's 
how I know something is coming to invade my kingdom. 
I'm not a princess but a king. So, I wear a crown made 
of bloody teeth and ride a white owl to the battlefield. 
There, I fight the falling debris of exploded stars. I win. 
In my real life, I grow up. I wear a school uniform that 
makes me look like Lucy from Peanuts. I make a few 
good friends, but we grow apart. In my dream life, they 
call me the toothless king, a destroyer and creator. There 
is peace in the gardens of my kingdom, and pink roses 
with blue eyeballs at their centers unfold and make the 
world smell like freshly cracked pistachios. In my real 
life, I go to a small college in Pennsylvania and every 
single one of my new friends gets drunk and wakes 
up with a boy's fingers inside them, or a boy's body on 
top of them. Twice, I carry a smaller girl home while 
she cries. In my dream life, a gray mist creeps over my 
kingdom. I grow a mouth full of baby teeth that scream
when it rains. I banish slippery-smiled people from my 
kingdom, the ones who throw parties and tell me I'm 
pretty. I tell them to wrap their belongings onto their 
backs, tie them up with a linen sack, and leave, go, be 
gone. I sit alone in my opalescent tower and the gray 
mist shuts all of the flower eyes. In my real life, I get a 
grant from the French department to study abroad. I eat 
lavender-flavored gelato and watch jugglers on unicycles 
maneuver ancient alleyways. I'm old enough to drink in 
the south of France, so my new friends and I buy cheap 
wine that tastes like vinegar and dance sur le pont
d'Avignon. In my dream life, the mist trembles a little, 
and I can see flashes of color behind it. The remaining
inhabitants of my kingdom, the talking animals and 
plant poets, say there is a possibility that the gray days 
may be lifting. They talk about me, shut up in my tower, 
like an ancient evil. My white owl tries to preen me, but I 
don't have any feathers. In my real life, I go to
Myrtle Beach and I lose track of a friend at a party. In the 
morning, I get a call from the local jail. They lead her out 
in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. A boy ripped her 
clothes off on the beach and she ran away naked and the 
cops threw her in jail for being indecent. In my dream 
life, the lightning comes. It irradiates the mist and kills 
the green grass and turns the toads reciting Shakespeare 
to stone. The lightning strikes the tower over and over 
again, and all of my baby teeth scream. In my real life, 
I meet the man I'll marry at a party, I move to Berlin, 
I move back, I get married, I work long hard jobs that 
don't require me to use my brain. I get called sweetie and 
sunshine and bitch by various bosses and people who 
call the office on the phone. In my dream life, the earth 
is scorched, but all of my screaming baby teeth have 
fallen out. I add them to my crown, which drips with 
blood. There are words banging on the doors of my opal 
tower, begging admittance to my abandoned kingdom, 
so I let them in. Vowels who aren't afraid of me, but sing 
loud low tunes of mourning and love. Consonants that 
chuckle and skip all around me. I smile a gummy smile. 
In my real life, my husband and I move from the worst 
apartment in the world to a better apartment, and I get 
into grad school. My boss gives me a nice purse as a
parting gift. Our new apartment is overrun with mice, 
so we adopt a cat. In my dream life, the vowels and 
consonants weave themselves together in a pattern that 
becomes people. Characters, they tell me, and I will write 
about them. I feel a new set of teeth, big and strong, like 
a horse's teeth, grow in. I smile a fat white smile and 
order the revived toads to fetch me a pen. We float up 
to the top of my ancient tower until our heads brush up 
against the bioluminescent mushrooms that sprout from 
the roof, glowing pink and green and blue. I write my 
name on the toads' skin and they shiver with happiness. 
In my real life, my cat purrs, my husband makes me 
pancakes, and there is sunshine coming through our bay 
window in the mornings. In grad school, my professors 
tell me not to write about dreams.

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