Rebirth: A Fifty Word Story
Rebirth
My eyes burn underwater. Diving deeper, I hold my breath. In front of me, a baby floats in his cotton blanket.
I grab him through the sapphire bubbles swirling around him. As we resurface, the child gleams, dissolving into water.
Air fills my lungs; I no longer wish to die.
The prompt for this week's fifty-word story is 'water'. You can read the rules on Fifty-word short story challenge roundup. This story was based on a dream I had this week (how appropriately timed).
Writing by Jeremy Mifsud
Photo by Ryan Loughlin on Unsplash
This is a very powerful story, @poetrybyjeremy. I'm completely captivated by it. I have so many questions. You don't need to answer them. Mainly, I wonder if the baby is real. I think not, since he dissolves into water. And so, in the imagined moment of lifting the baby from the water, does this vision reaffirm life for him -- that it is worth living? Wow. Beautifully done.
Thank you :) I think I have a good self-awareness of what my subconscious tries to tell me. My interpretation would be that the baby is a chance to start over -- to be reborn (hence the title).
In a way, if I'm unhappy with where I'm at in life, I don't need to die. I just need to pick things up and start in a new direction. I've been through a lot this year, but somehow I found some strength to move on and not mope around in the past, so I'm sure it has to do something with that.
Great story, @poetrybyjeremy; magical-realist. It poses so many questions about human existence, goodness and survival instincts.
Thank yo. I'm going to direct that comment to my subconscious which showed me this story in a dream.
Haha. That's the right thing to do. We owe so much to it.
I had one of those last night, but the story is so bizarre I'm having a hard time putting in on paper.
Urgent matters are keeping me away from it today, but I may end up posting it soon.
I guess we always have priorities.
What I do with dreams is I just write them down as I remember. Doesn't even have to be proper sentences. Then when I'm ready to make them into poetry or stories, I read back and edit them into something.
I do the same. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up, grab a pen, scratch some key words and go back to sleep. If the idea keeps bugging me, then I get and up work on it right then.
What a great conversation. I love this. I rarely remember dreams, and it is so sad to me. I wake up from dreams with a sensation of having dreamed. What lingers is a sense of some kind, like feeling, or hearing, or taste, but it's not any of those. And in the moment I try to grab onto that sense, it slips past me and is gone.
In the rare times when I do actually remember a dream, if I don't tell it to someone or write it down immediately, it is gone. It's as if it is on a plane between reality and subconsciousness, and I can only catch a rare glimpse.
I get that, I don't remember all dreams. But sometimes I can trace back one of those lingering sensations to the full dream.
Last night, I remember taking bites of my desk chair and it was crunchy and chocolatey. I also remember taking a bus and I remember an app on a laptop showcasing medicinal effects on a baby.
I only have those fragments, so I can't make sense of it. But now I'm tempted to try to eat my desk chair.
I suspect only a fraction of what we dream makes any kind of sense in the real world! 😊
Hi @jayna. I think that catching bits and pieces of dreams must be the case for most people, and it is the case for most of my dreams, when I think about it. The bizarre juxtaposition of elements is also common, which makes it harder to articulate and make sense of them.
I guess our oneiric selves must be like mega computers receiving and processing so much information that to the casual observer (our awaken self) it must look like ones and zeros; once in a while we sort of catch a pattern in the barrage of numbers.
Nice work! Glad you joined us.
Thank you :) I felt too tired to work on it over with people on text-edit so I let it be and edited on my own as much as I could.
Interesting imagery. I like it.