They arrived late, the red Camaro spitting gravel in the guest lot beside the country club. The engine cut off. The silence afterward was heavier than the heat.
She stepped out slowly, smoothing the hem of her orange chiffon dress. It caught in the breeze, a breath of fabric against the parched afternoon. People turned to look. She didn’t notice. Or perhaps she did and didn’t care.
He adjusted his collar, checked his teeth in the side mirror. “You look perfect,” he said.
She smiled the way she always did, with her lips only.
Inside, the music swelled—strings and chatter. Someone clapped near the bar. Waiters moved like choreography. He touched the small of her back, gently directing her into the crowd.
She walked slowly, her heels finding their rhythm on the tile, the kind of walk you practice alone before a mirror. The smile stayed in place. It had for years.
He introduced her. She nodded. Said the expected things. The man laughed too loudly. Another looked too long. The women leaned in with envy dressed as admiration. She floated among them all, beautiful and unreachable.
From the balcony above the dance floor, she saw herself.
She was younger then. Fifteen, barefoot in a backyard, lifting a dandelion to the sky and whispering wishes. Twenty, crossing a campus lawn, dreaming of books, children, a warm kitchen. Twenty-five, saying yes to promises laced in silk and status. And now—forty-five, dressed in fire, with nowhere to burn.
He was laughing again. She didn’t hear him.
A flicker of memory—a boy, once, who read her poems and brought her lemons from his tree. Poor. Earnest. Gentle. She had left him without goodbye. What could he have given her?
She felt it before she saw him.
He was at the door, older, grayer, hands in his pockets, like someone who’d wandered in by accident. Their eyes met. It was quiet between them. There, in the silence, she knew.
No children. No home of her own. No soft hands reaching for her face in sleep.
The music returned. The laughter. The rising hum of cocktail hour.
He left without speaking. She watched until he disappeared.
The man in the mirror touched her elbow. “Let’s find the car,” he said.
She nodded.
The orange chiffon fluttered behind her as she followed.
Author’s Note:
Every so often a dream arrives in the early morning hours with such clarity and emotional weight that it refuses to be ignored. This one did. I recorded it in my journal as I always do, but something about it haunted me. It had no obvious message, no grand symbol, yet it felt meaningful. The imagery stayed with me.
After I awoke, I asked ChatGPT to help analyze the dream. The interpretation was insightful, but I went one step further. I asked if the dream could be shaped into a short, literary scene in the style of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” — spare, poignant, heavy with emotion just beneath the surface. This is the result.
Yes, I realize that invoking Hemingway may cause concern for some of my readers, particularly since his original short story dealt with the delicate subject of abortion. That is not the theme of this piece. But the tone — that muted ache, the restrained sorrow — felt like the right way to honor the spirit of the dream.
This literary rendering was co-created. The dream was mine. The structure and style, I must credit to the brilliance of Hemingway and the capable hands of my digital collaborator. Note that ChatGPT (specifically DALL·E) would not create the image I have used. I had to go over to Grok (xAI) to generate it. Interesting.
This dream may not mean the same thing to every reader. For me, it was a mirror of choices. The woman might be someone I knew in another time, or perhaps she is a part of me—the creative soul I once promised to nourish but neglected in the pursuit of stability, productivity, and outward success.
Wow, this hits hard. It makes me think of our journey in this life. We begin, child-like, close to heaven, immersed and absorbed in the present, delighting in the simple wonders that God, nature, and this life offer. In time, we trade that in our pursuit for the pleasures of this world. We all had a Boy in our life, when we were younger – a poor, humble Boy, not able to offer us things that satisfy the desires of this world, but who attempted to tether our souls to something deeper, more profound, something eternal. We gradually forgot this Boy from our childhood as we began to relish what the world offers.
Later, when He appears to us again, in the form of an older, poor wayfaring man of grief, we’re stricken for a moment by the consequences of our forgetfulness. We realize all those things a deeper part of our soul yearned for in former times are absent and the opportunity for them is all but passed. A momentary sad longing wells in us, only to be interrupted by the reality before us. In this moment, we see that everything we ended up pursuing in our forgetfulness – what we came to believe we wanted – is here now, available for us to indulge in. Believing, now, it’s too late, we turn from the Man and resume the path we chose in our forgetfulness.