Somewhere Else Better by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

     Danielle Henry CC



Somewhere Else Better

We begin each day the same way: a fresh diaper for my wife, Brenda, getting dressed and brushing teeth. The pop of toast and scrape of a spatula in the pan, errands maybe, then a walk, the top of her head warm from the sun, mumble mumble mumble, her tongue thick like a piece of well-done steak. Then we do it all in reverse until I’m tucking her into bed again like we used to tuck our daughter in. Brenda, asleep next to me, while I read in a circle of lamplight. Tonight, I’m reading The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Brenda’s sudden outburst catches me by surprise. “But he doesn’t know!” I haven’t heard her speak this clearly in years.

I take off my glasses and close my book on my finger. “Who doesn’t know what?”

Her face turns steely, “That I’m a mermaid!”

Ah, she’s dreaming. I see her pupils zig-zagging beneath her lids. Brenda has always been a vivid dreamer. I imagine her fierce stare and magnificent tail, her salt-and-pepper hair billowing like smoke. 

“And,” her rheumy knuckled hand rises from the covers, a single index finger pointing, “I saw Sylvie!” I freeze.

Sylvie was twenty when someone found her in a ditch, without pants, dark purple bruises around her neck, and the whites of her eyes completely red from blown-out blood vessels. 

“A dragon grabbed her with its talons! I saw it fly away with her!” Brenda’s other hand rises, and together, they rediscover grace, flap away from me.

A few years ago, when Brenda started to noticeably confuse things, I reached out to our old friend Tom. He’s a neurologist. Or was, he’s retired now. He was part of the families we hung out with when the kids were small. After Sylvie’s funeral, he was the only guy who didn’t get weird: either gushing over me and treating me like a pity case, or avoiding me if we were in the same place, pretending he didn’t see me. But Tom was kind. I just needed to talk to someone who understood what I was going through, someone who remembered Sylvie. It was Tom who told me Mark’s wife has Alzheimer’s, too; comatose in a nursing home. Mark was of the assholes back in the day, but I didn’t have any hard feelings anymore, only a profound and exhausted sorrow.

“I need to go, or I’ll lose her again!” Brenda yells, her eyebrows arched, voice ringing through all the cobwebby silences between us, and I just want to cup her cheeks! But I don’t dare touch her when she’s this close to finding Sylvie. She’s been telling me about her Sylvie dreams for decades. Sometimes, she’s on a galloping horse chasing a train. Sometimes, she’s searching through the rubble of a collapsed building. Sometimes, she’s lost in a jungle.

Then, just as I dreaded, Brenda’s fierce aliveness melts back to blandness. I put my book on the nightstand, fold my glasses, and turn out the light. I lie on my side very close to her and examine her profile — in the moonlight, she is so beautiful — until my eyelids grow heavy. I’m glad she’s dreaming about dragons instead of trash bags in dumpsters or crawl spaces, like I do. The thick, green algae that cover the bottoms of lakes. Daughters dismembered, dissolved, or burned. Or worse, never found. At least, our Sylvie was found. Meanwhile, satellites continue to trail delicate seams in the sky and airplanes dot the sky with embroidered knots, and the stars still refuse to release their secrets, but there was never a map to this place.

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Dawn Tasaka Steffler is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a 2023 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, and her stories have been selected by the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and the Welkin Mini Prize. Her work appears in Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Ghost Parachute and more, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and The Pushcart. She is an associate fiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find her on social media as @dawnsteffler and also at www.dawntasakasteffler.com