Grandma’s Dream

There was a time, not too long ago, when grownups like your mum and dad had dreams.

They would dream every night of things that had happened or were to happen.

Sometimes these dreams were as delicious as milk.

And other times, they were as dark as a tyrant's heart and warned dreamers of dangers to come.

This is the last dream to be dreamt by a grownup. This is grandma’s dream.

Grandma is in a garden. Its high walls bristle with brilliant green vines.

There are fairies here. Yellow, pink, red and green. They have pointy little chins, arms and legs like little matchsticks. Their eyes are sparkly and cover half their faces. The fairies twitter in high, birdlike voices and fly on tiny translucent wings that shimmer in the sun.

The yellow fairies are the most plentiful, then pink, red and green.

They are all around grandma, braiding her long black hair. A pretty pink fairy holds up a small mirror for grandma, whose reflection smiles back at her, young and beautiful.

A wind blows and there is a creaking sound like an old, forgotten door opening and the fairies stop their twittering.

A big brown cake emerges from the creepers and floats past grandma. It's her birthday cake with her name on top in a neat, golden script.

The fairies erupt in chirping. The cake is set on a table with a blue cloth as bright as the morning sky.

There is a knife on the table with a white satin bow tied to the handle. The fairies crowd around grandma as she cuts the cake. A slice for her, a big slice for the yellow fairies, a medium slice for the pink ones, a small slice for the red and a tiny slice for the green.

The fairies look at their share of the cake. The green ones are unhappy, the red ones are disappointed, the pink ones are outraged. And the yellow ones don't want to share at all.

A fight begins. The red fairies poke the pink and yellow fairies in their eyes, the green fairies bite the arms and legs of red fairies, and the pink fairies grab the knife and chop off the heads of several red and yellow fairies. Blue fairy-blood cascades down grandma’s horrified face. A few fairies look pleadingly at grandma, waiting for her to intervene but grandma squeezes her head between her hands and screams.

The sound wakes up grandpa. He comforts grandma who tells him about the fairies.

“Something’s going to happen,” she whispers. “I know it. Dreams like this always mean something.”

"It's just a dream, dear," he says. "Here, drink some water and go back to sleep."

But grandma cannot sleep. And something terrible happens the next day: a commotion at the Republic Square. There is screaming and gunfire and all manner of chaos wrapped in blankets of thick blue smoke. And in the midst of it, a government falls to pieces.

"I told you. I told you it meant something," says grandma to grandpa, who shakes his head and turns to the TV. They hold hands and watch the news in forlorn silence.

From that day on, all grownups in the country stopped dreaming. But you still do. One day, you will dream of something that will fix everything, we grownups think. You will let us dream again.

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◙ NOTE: The Edition accepts submissions of creative works. The above submission is about the unrest that toppled the government of the former President Mohamed Nasheed.