My Dove

By Anya Shroff

My Dove

By fourth-year Erin O’Keefe

I was looking up at the snowy dove, this figure above the altar peeking out of a painted patch of blue sky. I thought it looked so delicate, its wings spread wide, and I wasn’t looking at him because I was looking at it. I was aware I was sleeping; I was lucid dreaming. I was laying on a cloudy white bed next to my husband, but he wasn’t my husband yet because I was standing at the altar looking at the dove. It was flying, flapping its wings, lost in a state of perpetual motion. I thought it looked so real, but I knew it was a figurine carved out of wood, etched into eternity. But it was flying above me, towards the sublime expanse of the sea outside our bedroom window. It was above me and my husband laying on the cloudy bed; it was above me and my husband standing at the altar.

I woke up; I was married.

The sun seeped past the shades and it was morning. My husband, the one I had married yesterday, said, “Did you sleep nice?”

I said, “I had a dream about that dove, the one above the altar yesterday.”

He smiled and said, “I can’t believe we got married yesterday.”

“Why can’t you believe it?” I sounded slightly wounded, like I’d hurt my wing. I was flying too fast past evergreens and I hit it on a pine tree. I was bleeding, red on white; red on white sheets of the ruined cloudy bed.

He said, “I don’t know, it just felt like a dream.”

“A good dream?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What happened in the dream?” I shifted closer to him.

“Well, you were there, of course. Dressed in white, this beautiful dress, billowing like a cloud, and you were standing at the altar looking up at me, and you said, ‘I do,’ and you looked like a dove.”

“And then what?”

“And then we flew here, a white plane against a patch of blue sky, and I drove you through those evergreen trees to this little town by the sea, and you looked sublime when I kissed you.” He closed his eyes as if to relive this fantasy.

“What about now, that you’ve woken up from this dream?”

“Who said anything about waking up? No, I’ll be asleep forever, dreaming about you; sleeping with open eyes all day, closing them at night, but always dreaming of you: my dove at the altar.”