Dinronk Drive was a drab little street consisting of about five blocks of single story homes, the road way set in an unimpressive U-shape between Ballast Avenue and Venrag Street. It wasn?t remarkable by any stretch of the imagination, and though the inhabitants of the neighborhood were RhyDinians, they too were modestly average in their peculiarities. Small families, young couples (though sometimes ?couples? could consist of enough people to form a small family?), creatures just familiar enough with the town to find a place with cheap rent ? these were the denizens of Dinrock. It was the kind of area you could pass by and entirely forget about easily in a town that had much more exciting venues to offer.
However, in the early hours of the late night, it was precisely the kind of place she wanted to be. On Dinronk Drive, those small families were just starting to wind down and settle in. In fact, some of the smaller members of the households were already sleeping. She was sure of it. It was the very reason she came. She couldn?t yet see them, but she could hear them; the threads of dream-stuff were busily being wound together into intricate little tales.
She passed numbers twenty-eight and thirty-five, absently glanced at the bizarre collection of topiaries outside of house number forty, and continued to glide further past the house on her right with the broken mailbox. It wasn?t until she saw the faded pistachio green awning of duplex number forty-seven that she finally moved off the street. She slid through the squat gate and over the cracked pathway that cut through the browning lawn. She didn?t stop to look at the gentleman on his lawn chair next to her. He didn?t look at her, either. That was to be expected, though, for she was as good as a ghost. Ahead of her were two doors, both sea-foam with green trim; one door read 47a and the other, 47b.
47b was the home of the gentleman on the lawn chair now behind her, a widower named Louis. He often dreamt of his wife, a petite woman who had been called Lois. ?Lanta had always wondered how that hadn?t become more than a bit confusing, or if maybe it had even been a bit narcissistic on each of their parts, but she usually was too distracted by the fleeting tenderness in his sleeping memories to delve into the psychology behind their spousal name choices.
47a, on the other hand, was the abode of Rey?ell, a cat-like humanoid charmed with bright yellow eyes, smooth cheeks, and tufts of tawny fur that protruded from her pointed ears, her jaw, elbows, shoulders, and probably a dozen other places. Rey?ell had two sons that lived with her, Enzi and Parth, with Enzi being the oldest of the pair. Enzi was gawky and solemn, and his resting mind often reflected it. Missed exams, being humiliated in front of his crush, having his pants rip when standing up to deliver a report ?but also, defeating the bully, getting the girl, and once even about buying the school and forcing all the teachers to eat the class assigned text-books: these were the things Enzi dreamed about. But Parth? Oh, Parth was much more care-free. He often conjured up pictures rather than plots, his sleeping brain a wondrous place of bright colors and frenetic images strung together, the little boy hopping and exploring the whole night through. True, his nightmares were as terrifying as any child?s with an imagination, but she soothed those when she visited. She much preferred his whimsy.
She tilted towards 47a, stretched her arm out to move through the door ? when suddenly, Louis sat up in his lawn chair and made the plastic-y cables groan oddly under his paunch.
?Wha?s go?n?? he blustered.
?Lanta froze. He?d never seen her before. No one had?that she knew of, anyway. This was, at the very least, certainly the first time someone had called her out on her dream-walking. Her mind raced with any and every excuse she could come up with as to what she was doing there at this hour. Nanny? Social worker? Long-lost, non-feline sister? When she finally settled on an excuse that seemed half-way plausible, she turned to face Louis.
But she didn?t see Louis. Not at first, not through the purple. In her current state, she was no more solid than the fog she was staring into, but perhaps she was not as dense. That would explain how it blocked her view and so easily engulfed her?
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In her bed, in her quaint cottage on the opposite side of the Marketplace from Dinronk Drive, Atalanta woke with a start, holding her throat as she came up coughing and flailing.
Breathing? Sleep? Had she ever done those two together before?
