I had an odd dream the other night. So, I wrote a story about it:

In a dream, a man lost his son. The son wouldn’t stop committing crimes. He wouldn’t stay in his room, no matter how much the man yelled for this. The son kept stealing the policeman’s handcuff key, pickpocketing wallets. He threatened the world with strange little fists and darted through rooms with a knife.

Outside, an asteroid, trailing great curls of smoke, arced down from a quiet sky, turned away the earth, and raced back into the atmosphere, the desperate cities below glowing orange.

The man woke up weeping, but he didn’t know why. He’d never lost his son in the waking world. In the waking world, his son was intelligent, thoughtful, well-mannered, somewhat clumsy in roomfulls of furniture, and his smile taught the man the mysteries of love.

“Why did I wake up crying?” the man asked his wife, but she didn’t know. In Argentina, he asked a man selling hotdogs on the street and the man gave him a hotdog with onions and peppers. In China they said we know less about dreams than we do about children but that asteroids are stones lurking among an ambience of mindless potency.

When he got home, the man found his son grown, mowing the lawn, grinning in the sun. The man’s knees throbbed and his face hurt from the winds of the sea. He raised a hand and waved to his son, surprised at how green the trees hung, how the smell of grass migrated across the drive in gusts. His son raised a hand back, and he aimed the mower at a patch of ground grown wild. Inside, the man kissed his wife. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, peeled off his worn clothes, and lay down and went to sleep.