Between Dream and Reality

More about Between Dream and Reality

Mollie awoke beneath the old apple tree in his garden. A branch swayed above him, the light trickling through the leaves like liquid amber. It was quiet. Not the usual kind of quiet, but the kind that comes after something. After an adventure, after a promise not yet fulfilled. He lay on moss that felt cool and familiar. His back felt every wrinkle in the ground, but in his hand: metal. He looked down. A gear. Tiny. Delicately shaped like a dragonfly, with shimmering edges that pulsed in the light. Beside him: more parts, scattered in the grass like seeds sown by the wind. He sat up. His backpack was there. His clothes: the same as in San Francisco. Jeans, shirt, suspenders. His sunglasses were perched on his nose, and his bronze monocle dangled like a last thought on a thread of memory. Had it been a dream? He reached into his jacket pocket. A faint crack. His fingers felt a flat, round object—a glass chip, framed in a copper pattern. As he pulled it out, it began to glow. Not brightly, but gently—as if it first needed to remember reality. Mollie held it up to the light. The chip projected an image, fleeting yet precise: a floating bridge of light dust, a tree with glass branches and number plates, a sky crisscrossed by a ring of gears as large as the horizon. And beneath it: himself. Sitting, listening, waiting. A shiver ran through him. Not from cold. But from premonition. He didn't remember everything. But enough. Enough to know that something had been waiting there—not for him as a figure, but for what he brought with him: questions, wonder, courage. The gears in the grass suddenly moved. No wind. No animal. They rolled, humming softly, toward each other, fitting together, clicking into each other—not into a machine, but into a gesture. As if they were saying, "We remember." Mollie stood up. His gaze swept over the garden. Nothing had changed—and yet everything. The colors were deeper. The shadows more vivid. A robin sang a pattern he had never heard before. He put the chip back in. Something had remained. Something had accompanied him. And it would return. He turned toward the house, about to take the first step, when his gaze slid back—to the tree, the grass, the gears. One of them was missing. Instead, there lay a tiny leaf. Paper-thin, made of golden vapor. On it: a single word. Not written, but formed like a sound. Mollie didn't understand. Not yet. But he smiled. Because what was once there leaves traces. And sometimes the best stories begin not with a portal, but with the awakening afterward.