“Danny, wake up!” My mother’s hands gripped my shoulders, shaking me back to reality. My eyes blurred with tears, but I could see her shadow bent close, her face marked with fear and concern.

“What were you dreaming about?” my sister Tony muttered from the doorway, irritation lacing her voice. She hated when my nightmares kept her awake.

I could barely speak, my body still trembling. “Mom, there were people… machines… the people!” The words tumbled out broken, fragments of something too real to dismiss. I was sprawled out on rocks in the middle of a city, my head pounding, my body exhausted. It had not felt like a dream at all.

“It was only a dream, my child,” my mother whispered, though her voice sounded less certain than she wanted it to. She pressed a pink pill into my palm, one of the sedatives she had kept since my father passed. I stared at it, afraid it might trap me deeper inside the nightmare.

When Tony returned with apple juice, my mother caught our hands suddenly. “Our Father who art in heaven, please watch over my girls,” she prayed aloud, her voice fierce and trembling. I curled into the blankets, waiting for the pill to pull me under, the prayer still ringing in my ears.