Five Days in Summer

danced on great big clouds .... Sam listened as she spun the story precisely as she always had: the clouds forming a wall, a hole opening in the wall, the mouse running through the hole into a kitchen, finding a plate of cheese and peanut butter and cookies, then discovering a way out into a warm field, that led into a shady little wood, in which slept a big warm bear, in whose soft fur the little mouse nestled and fell asleep and dreamed.
    Sam’s eyes were wide open. She kissed him, and had no idea how to lull him back to sleep, how to influence his mind to relax and slide into gentle dreams, how to convince him monsters weren’t real and lurking everywhere. Worse, maybe, that you couldn’t identify them. She had been unnerved in the store by the corn man, but hadn’t even noticed the person she had really needed to fear. Even now, when she recalled that recent day, she couldn’t see him anywhere.