The bell continues its tolling long after I’ve caught my breath and reassured my frantic senses that it’s only my robe tangled about my legs and not an embittered whirlpool pinning me in place. Maybe lost children are different, I told him. He was reading a psychology text at the time – one that washed up mostly undamaged in a professor’s trunk – and insisted that children could not retain memories from infancy. He chided me for my imagination, saying that I couldn’t possibly remember Montreal.
As with any dream, it came without prompting I hadn’t thought of Before in many years, not since the day I mentioned to Theodore how I once picnicked before the fountain at Carre St-Louis. Though it’s well past midnight, I’ve abandoned my bed hours ago, after a dream that left me feeling more awake than asleep: images of a mother’s warm smile, a father’s gentle hand, the prodding of a rosy-cheeked nursemaid, and the coos of a baby brother. It catches me off guard, wrapped as I am in the oblivion of my work, and I jolt upright, gasping for air and fighting an illusory current as my mind replays flashes of arms and legs and the scream of twisting metal. The bell’s hollow call still elicits a chill of mid-April night air through my bones and the taste of brine on my lips.
The ringing of the sea-bell pulls me from the page of the book I’d been poring over for the next day’s lesson.
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