When the Dream Ends
by D. C. Martin
Part 1 appears in this issuel.
conclusion
Liam closed his eyes and tried to go back, even though he didn’t want to, even though he hated her, even though he hated her glasses, and the hurtful eyes behind them.
“I can see all the way up the tree. I can see them. I can see it like I’m watching from a distance. I can see the boys. I can see them.”
“Them. Really? I thought we got past this, Liam. This is your delusional memory. You needed to create a better reality to cope with what had happened, with the loss you suffered. But you don’t need that anymore. You have your own life, you have a son that you need to take care of. You were alone. There was no one else in the birch tree.”
Of course. This is paranoia, this is delusion, this is Liam. But what about the picture? Why was it locked away? Concealed practically his whole life. A presence ripped away by bad decisions, by a committee of people who knew better than he. He was going to take back his own life and, with it, take back reality, even if it was a pain too intense to bear.
“I can see it. I can see us both. It’s like watching a movie. I can see my hand... ” Liam felt as he did when he was five years old. Like this was the first dream all over again. He could feel himself turning black, turning to nothing.
“I need a nurse in here, stat...”
* * *
When Bobby came to see him in the hospital, Liam had to tell his son again that this was only temporary, and he needn’t worry.
“Go home, please. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“I love you, Dad.” His eyes barely met his father’s as he said it. Visiting your father in the hospital is painful. Liam knew it, and so did his son.
Bobby pulled his jacket on and shot Liam a nice smile as he turned to the door and disappeared down the hallway. What happened to me? Liam thought. I used to be a great father. He let the tears roll down his cheeks and wished he had some serious alcohol.
* * *
“’This is my tree! Climb down or suffer the consequences!’ I was serious, we both knew that. His eyes showed fear, but also the thrill of reaching the top of the tree. Looking down from that height was terrifying. Like the summit of a rollercoaster, waiting for the drop. It was all part of the fun of course, but climbing that high was... intoxicating. It was an old birch. Branches could snap any moment.”
Liam cleared his throat.
“The crack was loud, louder than you would expect. I saw his hand reach out. I saw it in slow motion. Just a momentary grip, it just happened for a second. The distance and the time. Damn, it can turn a hero into a villain. He was saved and then lost. He fell, my grip couldn’t hold him back. I just wasn’t strong enough. By the time he hit the ground, he was so broken and bloody. I just didn’t think he would get through it.”
Liam took a sip of water and breathed out hard. “I had him. I gripped him, just around the wrist. It felt good, saving him. But I couldn’t hold him, and I watched him fall. I knew when the first limb broke through him, when the first branch stabbed into him. I knew when I heard his bones crack and tear. I knew when he finally hit the ground and spat out blood. I knew then that I was going to do it. But, when he finally got to the ground, I just wanted him to forgive me. All I had was guilt.
“’I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, it was an accident.’ I kept apologizing, but then my hands gripped his throat and there was no going back.”
Doctor Miller rubbed her temple for a moment. “Just to be perfectly clear: you murdered your imaginary brother, correct?” As usual, she didn’t want to believe Liam.
“What do you want me to say?”
Dr. Miller tilted her head from side to side, rolled her shoulders and made an obvious display of checking her watch.
“What year did your mother leave, Liam?” she asked as she got her pen and pad ready to record the answer.
“I suppose it was around nineteen eighty-three,” he returned. It was September seventeenth, nineteen eighty-two to be exact. Liam was slowly becoming aware of his mental state, comfortably numbed by the receding effect of whatever medication was prescribed by the infallible Dr. Miller. Liam could feel himself finally taking control.
“Fine. You were young. Your mother left you. That was traumatic. You have every right to feel angry. You have every right to hate her, hate the world, hate me. Go ahead. But as an adult, Liam, an adult with a therapist, you don’t need to turn yourself into the villain. Your mom was the villain. She left when you needed her most.”
Dr. Miller got up from her desk and walked to the window and looked out for a moment. She then returned to her desk, but stood in front, her fingers resting on its edges as she reclined a little. “I want you to be completely honest with me, Liam. I want you to admit that this is all a fantasy. You never had a brother, did you?”
Liam spent a good while trying to figure out a way to talk her into it. She wasn’t ever going to believe him, he knew that for certain. The boy in the picture was buried too deep. He looked away and then over at her for a second, at her rather severe expression, the furrows at the top of her nose. Then he looked at the wall of framed accolades that adorned her otherwise spartan office. He took in some deep breaths. The doctor taught him that.
“I’m ready,” Liam said, as the doctor turned a new yellow leaf.
“He suffered through those last moments. I watched him fall, faster than you could possibly imagine. I watched him hit the ground and sputter and cough and bleed. Then I looked at my hands again. If only I had held on to him. I ran to get help, and he was rushed to the hospital, full recovery. A miracle.”
Liam always had trouble reading facial expressions. Especially now, her face was completely blank. For a moment, it seemed like the world had paused. He knew what he had to do.
“I never had a brother.”
The existence of the picture made him more and more angry because so much therapy and medication had gone into erasing it. His life had become such a lie, but you can’t ignore a lie that is staring straight back at you from a forty-year old photograph. He knew the truth, and he finally had the proof to settle his mind. He could dream the rest of the dream. That’s when the dream ends, when you wake up certain that you know the truth and your psychiatrist doesn’t. The truth really happened and you spent your day erasing it.
* * *
There would be proof, he told himself. There would be a police record or something tangible. There would be evidence of his time spent in the hospital. Liam sifted through the contents of boxes. He scoured through papers and documents as Bobby slept downstairs. Heaps of his father’s life scattered on the floor, boxes empty and overturned in the cold attic. He was shivering and he could see his breath, but he wasn’t stopping. There would be something undeniable.
He let things fall through his fingers, but caught a photograph. Here it was: he was holding it in his hand, shivering still. Finding the one tiny fragment from all of the items in all of the boxes to prove it. His smiling face. Liam’s arm slung around him, waiting for their stories to be written, both of them by a cruel author. The boy’s life was taken before he could become the failure that Liam was. He was lucky; he escaped the fate that Liam needed to suffer.
Liam was deprived of the truth for so long that he had become accustomed to it. He instantly knew why his parents had buried it. Part of him wanted to put it all back in the box and lock it all away again; close it up again and hide deep in the box in his mind. He understood why his father did it. But once that box was opened, there was no way to un-open it.
I had him, I know I did, I had him right there, and I took it all away. I took it all away from him.
He turned the picture over. The words that his mother had written on the back made his heart race even faster: “Liam and Michael, best friends, 1981.”
It was clear now what needed to be done. He could picture the office. He could picture her smug expression behind her ridiculous glasses. He could see the cold grey paint and the MDF moulding. He could see the scary painting, and he could see himself doing it, like it was a dream that he had already dreamt. He could picture life leaving her, his hands gripping, the pulse coming to a stop.
“Let’s start with the dream again,” she said as she flung back a yellow page from her pad with her left hand and tucked it under her right hand, looking up at him, waiting behind the shiny, angular glasses. Liam was distracted by the backwards, bleeding-red words from his predecessor’s session:
“Bondage. Discipline.” He devoured the words quickly, letting them bleed into the fibers of his anxious mind.
She proceeded: “Memories are complicated, Liam,” she said with a condescending gaze. “We remember the picture of something, but facts that we remember are tangled with feelings.”
She looked away from Liam and towards the window. “We all have a self-image. I have one, my mental picture of myself. I believe that people see me in a certain way. But the idea that I can control that is an illusion. You think of me differently from the way I think of myself. I can accept that. In the end, I am more than just the way people perceive me, and more than the way I perceive myself. But the person, Cassandra Miller, who I am, that essence of me... I can’t define it, and I can’t change it. No one can. You can’t escape who you are, Liam.”
She paused, as always, to insinuate his delusory state. “Are you alright, Liam?”
* * *
When it was all over Liam crossed over to the other side of the desk. He opened the rather large file that said Liam Walter Barnes. It had various documents with stamps that had dates and seals and signatures. He flipped through it frantically, hoping for some further confirmation.
He saw a document about his latest hospital admission and started peeling back the pages, racing through them faster and faster. His hospital admission from 1981 listed the reason for admission as: “critical condition... asphyxia... severe lacerations... concussion.”
His later admissions were for: “PTSD... Bipolar Disorder... Delusions... Depression... Paranoia... suppression of memories.”
It was a long list, enough to justify turning his medicine cabinet into a pharmacy. The asphyxiation part made his heart beat so fast that he fell to his knees remembering not the dream and not what Dr. Miller had told him but the real, final truth.
He just stared up at the sun behind the gently waving branches of the birch tree until the boy from the picture looked down at him, blocking out the light. Liam had just been pushed from the top of the tree, but he had managed to hang on until his branch snapped loudly.
Michael smiled when Liam fell and didn’t reach out for him or try to save him. He smiled the same way again as Liam was sprawled out on the ground with blood pooling around him and bones poking through his skin. Michael’s hands gripped Liam’s neck sending him into an adrenaline fueled panic attack. Liam was controlled by rage so completely that he was able to overpower his friend.
The pain Michael had caused came rushing out of Liam’s hands, channeling the screaming voice of his vengeful mind. Liam gripped Michael’s neck and rolled him to the ground. He pressed harder and pushed his knee into the boy’s chest with all his weight, Liam’s blood spilling onto the suffocating boy’s T-shirt like hot syrup.
Liam felt each pulse in the meaty part of his hands between his thumb and forefinger. It had a chugging flow, like the way a large bottle empties. It slowed down, and Micheal’s fingernails withdrew from prying apart his stranglehold. It took a long time before Michael’s body was just still, and Liam’s hands released themselves and relaxed.
Liam looked at what he had done and he just wailed and screamed but he couldn’t move. He didn’t know what a compound fracture was, but seeing a shattered bone sticking out of his leg and watching the hot crimson liquid pulse out was too much to bear.
Liam had a breakthrough. It really defined his next steps. That’s the dream. That’s the real one. Dr. Miller was right: he had never had a brother. He heard a knock on the door but did nothing because he was completely paralyzed, his mind trying to compute an impossible reality. The knock came again and then Dr. Miller’s assistant walked in without looking up from her schedule, not immediately noticing anything strange and said, “Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Miller, but your four o’clock appointment—”
She saw Dr. Miller lying on the floor and turned around so fast that she hit her head on the door and knocked herself out. Now there were two bodies on the floor.
Liam looked at his hands and realized that his fingernails had dug through his palms again. His whole body started shivering as the blood speckled the carpet squares on the floor beneath his fists. He had reached his goal now, delusional or not. He had emptied all of his boxes. He had poured them all out on the floor of Cassandra Miller’s office.
“You can’t escape who you are,” Liam said out loud as he walked over to the unconscious assistant, his hands swelling open again, ready for their next grip.
Copyright © 2026 by D. C. Martin
