The Wine Trap Family

I've had the same nightmare all my life. It's as familiar to me as your favorite film is to you. And whether I'm nine or thirty-nine, I come awake in the dark, damp sheets clutched in my sweaty hands.

In th nightmare I watch my family die one by one, me standing uselessly by.

As a kid the nightmare was more real, more traumatic than most of my waking moments. I ran into my parents' room, dove between my parents, interrupting their dreams to tell them they died in mine. To tell them how they went, and how it felt.

I couldn't differentiate my eyes-open reality and my the one inside my head when I was younger. The worlds only I could visit were so detailed and intricate that they still strike me as having been real, unlikely to be hallucinations wholly constructed by a brain soaked in a cocktail of neurochemicals.

"It didn't happen, Paul," his parents got used to saying to him, half-asleep. "There was no well. We didn't die. We're not going to die."

In the nightmare I'm in the parking lot of a flower shop. There's a creek with big rocks. There's a well of brick with a bucket and a crank, but otherwise open to the sky. I'd relay these details to my parents on these occasions, sweating and hyperventilating. What I had seen was real. I had dead parents who were down the well, and I had living parents who wanted me to believe what I had seen was just some conjuration of my sleeping brain.

I'd have the dream every few weeks, each time experiencing the inability to change anything, the inability to remember ever having had the dream before. Each visit to my parents' bed held the same gravity, in my mind. They needed to know. They were being called again by the well.

By thirteen, I’d stopped having the dream. For thirty years I lived free of the horror. I forgot the details of it, how it ruled me, how I stayed up reading to stave off the nightmare, how I slept with lights on and door open. I grew up, moved out, got a job pushing lines of code, and made enough to live in my own house, alone.

On Halloween, the night before my forty-fourth birthday, the dream came back.

Something else, too.

Appearing only on work calls, and with groceries ordered in, I let my hair grow long. My physique tumbled out of shape. I worked too much and my brain numbed and I focused on paying rent, feeding my cat, and sleeping enough. I felt like a zombie—heck, I looked like one. So, when October rolled around and people started asking what I’d do for my birthday, or if they could invite me to a party as an honored guest, I couldn’t help but feel warm. These people want me around, I’d catch myself thinking. They think I’m worth seeing outside of work.

Being noticed and celebrated snaps me out of it, wakes me up. I look around and see how I’ve been living. It’s not pretty.

Through poor habits and a lax attitude about trash, I’ve created an ecosystem for several dozen fruit flies. A coworker suggested I set up a wine trap.

"What’s that?" I asked, never having heard the phrase.

"A wine trap," my coworker explained, "is a bottle of wine with plastic wrap rubber banded over the opening. You poke some holes in the plastic and wait."

I was interested, if not somewhat stricken by the cruelty of the method.

The fruit fly, attracted to the wine, lands on the cellophane and crawls through the holes seeking the source of the smell. It needs to get out, but it can’t. It slips, falls, and eventually dies, drowning in intoxicating death. Its siblings can’t help but follow suit.

I’m on a deadline, so I set up a wine trap and forget about it.

In scrambling to get ready for my birthday parties, I start looking at myself in the mirror the way I imagine other people look at me. I decide to change certain things. I go for a haircut and it’s been so long I don’t know what to ask for. I’m less productive at work preparing for these parties, but for some reason I don’t care, and I don’t care who knows I don’t care. I’m also depressed and sad and dead set on not admitting it to myself or anyone else.

So it’s Halloween. I’ve procrastinated with a focus on an event the night following Halloween that I have done nothing to prepare for trick-or-treaters. I’m embarrassed over and over again as trick-or-treaters ring my bell and bang my knocker and I open the door with nothing. Finally, hoping to escape the shame, I put up a sign and turn out the lights.

I see the shape of a wine bottle in the dark of the living room, the one with the plastic wrap tied around the top with a rubber band. The wine trap.

It’s been weeks since I set it up, or thought about it.

I pull the plastic wrap off the bottle and look inside. A froth of tiny bodies have accumulated on the surface of the liquid. So it had worked as promised: the fruit flies crawled in and got drunk, and trapped, and died. I poured the wine down the sink, thinking of the flies, following each other one by one into the opening, and now being flushed down the drain together, lifeless. I killed them so easily, I hadn’t even noticed I did it.

I lay on the couch and dream the dream I haven’t had since I was a child. Here’s how it goes: I’m with my family and my extended family at a small town flower shop with a well out front. We pile out of our vans and approach the front of the store. I’m smaller than everyone else, everyone else is an adult and I’m probably three years old. As we come to the door someone, I think my father, turns, kneels and tells me “stay out here,” and though I want to disobey, follow them into the flower shop, I don’t. I stop where I’m at.

I wait, alone.

After a while someone comes out of the flower shop. Nobody from my family or my extended family, just a teen girl who’s purchased a bag of items. A teen girl who walks to the well and looks over the cobbled edge into the supported column of nothing. She looks at me.

"Oh, hello, little boy!," she says. "They left you out here by yourself, huh? Hey, did you see? The bucket in this well is broken!”

She leans over and reaches into it, I guess for the broken bucket, then her legs are in the sky and she disappears down the well. I freeze where I stand. My hand dangles in the horizon of my vision, my finger extended as I point.

Adults, some from my family, some I didn’t know, stream from the flower shop. I’m yelling but I can’t hear myself. An adult climbs the wall of the well, to reach into it for the girl—

—and disappears down the well himself.

More panicked adults sprint to the well and, grabbing for each other, disappear into it. My uncle, my dad. My aunt, my mom tries to save her and falls in. Other people in the shop, the shopkeeper, the employees. Gone, just like that. Screaming, they each disappear, and I’m alone. With nobody left to hear my cries or dry my tears, I toddle to the well. I climb up the side, and peer into the inky black.

As a kid, I’d wake up at this point, shivering in sweated-through pajamas. This time, it’s not over. I see a long drop and a splash of glinting lights spiraling and pinwheeling in the distance.

Is my family down here? What's that sweet smell?

Leaning forward, I lose my grip, and fall in.

I awake in an almost forty-four-year-old body to another round of trick-or-treaters, who’ve ignored the sign and the doused lights and are gathered on my porch waiting for candy. I have none.

I open the door, and a family of fruit flies stands out there. Ten of them. Fifteen.

“Sorry, no candy this year, I…”

They come through the door, I can’t stop them. Behind them, a small fly, maybe three days old, stands and points at me, mouth open, buzzing.