A Field Guide to Dreams

The first dream got out on the Tuesday after the funeral, while Folake was washing her grandmother’s teacups. It was small, grey-brown and about the size of a sparrow, and it smelled faintly of the sea. It came from the bedroom, where the boxes were. It crossed the kitchen ceiling in short, uncertain flights, bumping the lampshade, and settled at last on top of the fridge between the rice cooker and a tin of Ovaltine that had been empty since 2019. Folake stood at the sink with a tea towel and watched it. It watched her back, if a thing with no obvious eyes can be said to watch. Outside, Peckham was doing what it did in November: drizzling, honking, frying chicken. She did not scream. Later she would wonder about that. She was not, by temperament, a calm woman; she cried at adverts and once left a cinema because a dog in the film looked unwell. But there was…