Sandman

• Rachel Huynh, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2019

“Have you ever heard of the Sandman, Miss?”

Blue eyes gaze up, large and round, as she looks down at him from the high reaches of the apple tree’s canopy. He is a child of no more than nine years, probably one of the neighbourhood kids she doesn’t care too much for. She can only pin him with a look of exasperation, but the boy does not wither under her hard stare.

“No. I haven’t.” Her face is contorted into an ugly scowl as she reaches for the closest apple, twisting the stem and tossing the red fruit at the boy below. She misses. “Don’t call me ‘Miss’; it makes me sound old. I’m fourteen.”

Even after the apple harmlessly rolls away with a trailing cloud of golden dust, the boy stands calm and unfazed, exposing the magnitude of his impertinence. He has the decency to show some chagrin but remains placid, which brings a slew of discomfort and annoyance that she rubs away with pinched fingers at her temple. She wants him to leave.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” he says, feigning remorse. She feels the pulsing heat in her veins that merely intensifies the itch under her skin. He continues with a smile, pleasant and amiable. “It’s a shame you don’t know about the Sandman. How’s your mother these days?”

“Fine.” There is no grace nor warmth as she bites out her response. Gossip spreads like wildfire across the small neighbourhood of Stepford housewives, and her mother’s reputation begets misconstrued lies and exaggerated narratives like a moth to a flame. The fragmented scraps of bark crumble like thin wisps of sand through the cracks between her fingers, which she thinks is poetically symbolic of a shredded relationship that would remain ever broken. She looks away, bitter words scathing and harsh. “I wouldn’t really know.”

His face darkens beneath the passing shadows of low-hanging apples, revealing only the contours of an indiscernible expression.

“That’s… a shame.”

“I don’t care,” she replies sharply.

“You don’t want to give her a chance?” he asks, as though her stubbornness is the sole divide between mother and daughter reaching towards each other, just shy of touching and truly understanding. She tries to stifle the hollow feeling of resentment that has settled like a weight in her gut.

Her mother is as asinine as the boy before her, and just as intangible.

The boy is silent for a singular pensive moment but when he speaks, his muted voice ghosts her ears like ashes in the wind. The foliage of the apple tree rustles in the breeze, and she only just manages to hear his silvery lilt, soft and benign. “The Sandman wishes you well.”

The boy peers up with a shade of pity packed under subtlety, plucks the apple from his feet, then vanishes with a ghost of a smile.

The apples are still dyed red when she wipes the sand from her eyes. Reality is unchanged, but her wistful dream lingers like distant memory, unforgotten.