The modest stone cottage is lit by three flickering candles and a crackling colorful fire in the small stone hearth. Its only room is crowded with old but well cared for furniture and is both quiet and warm. Vases and pots of great diversity filled with flowers and what most would call weeds are scattered on and about the furniture and floor. Dried flowers and herbs tied with twine hang from the ceiling add a potpourri of scents and colors increasing the cramped feeling. On the west side of the room is a cot containing a sleeping heavily built man covered with a thick woolen blanket. His head is all that is visible with grey balding hair and matching grey beard that frames his square chin. There are signs of bruising and recently removed stitches on his face and bald pate where a particularly large bruise is noticeable.
A woman sits quietly in the center of the cottage at a round wooden table reading from a very well used book bound in dark red leather. Close at hand lies a small clay cup filled with a dark viscous liquid. She is well formed and attractive, which she does nothing to enhance. She is dressed in a shapeless gray dress that does no more than cover her, while her copper hair falls down her shoulders in untamed tangles. The only ornament she permits herself is a necklace of coloured wooden beads around her pale and freckled neck. She appears weary and perhaps bored with her reading material. The evening has been quiet until a groan is emitted by the injured man on the cot.
Her patient is dreaming again. Normally she likes to study the effects dreams have on him but she didn't notice soon enough this time. She watches closely as his face contorts in what seems a grimace of pain and then a shudder runs through his entire bulky frame followed immediately by a relaxation and sigh as he sinks into the blanket covered crisscross of ropes that serves as a mattress. She picks up the clay cup then moves quickly to the cot in time to hear him whisper a half sentence, “missed yer, somethin’ awful.” Tears flow down his rough and damaged face.
The woman shakes his shoulder then again and again when he fails to wake immediately for her. “Wake up, wake up, it’s time for your medicine,” she says in her best stern voice.
The middle aged man wakes to a relentless pale hand pushing on his shoulder. “Wha’?” He looks around with confusion on his face until the dream fades into the ether. He looks up at the woman in her plain and shapeless shift holding a cup of the nasty beverage she’s been forcing on him for days or weeks, time has little meaning here.
The memory of the dream didn't fade as most do upon waking. “I got me a wife. An’ her name’s….. He looks up at the woman with his broken look of confusion. “I can’ ‘member it,” he says with a voice full of disappointment.
“You’re dreaming, it doesn’t mean a thing. Here drink this,” she says thrusting the clay cup under his nose. The smell makes him shiver. With reluctance he drinks quickly from the proffered cup and shivers violently. “Tweren’t jus’ a dream. I knows I gots me a wife, a young wife, wit’ blonde hair an' tha face o' a angel.” He looks around searching for his clothes as if the health he had in the dream was enough to get him out of this cottage that’s been his hospital and home for the past weeks.
“You don’t even know your own name or this dream wife’s. Just relax and let the medicine do its work. You’ll be out of her sooner than later but not this soon. You wouldn't make it half a mile,” she said with an encouraging smile which changed to a frown of disappointment the moment his eyes closed and he fell back to sleep.
Sighing she adjusted his covers then returned to the table to refill the cup with its elixir of sleep and healing. She sits down with the intention of resuming her reading but instead pushes the book away then turns to watch the large man sleeping in a deep drug-induced state. She shakes her head making the copper red tangles sway about her head. Speaking in a soft whisper to herself she laments, “Better you didn’t remember big man, better you didn't.”
