Ever since she was a child, Mia O’Neal longed to be someone else. In school she’d fantasize about leaving her body and inhabiting those of her more exciting classmates. Trying on their skins like the second-hand dresses her mother brought home for her from the thrift store. You see, Mia wasn’t one of those cute kids who looked like they were cut out of Macy’s catalogue. She wasn’t the smart one either, or the well-dressed one, or the one with a secret talent like juggling or playing the drums. No. Mia was the one with knotted hair, with snaggled teeth, with a tubby little belly that her mother adored but her classmates mocked.
It was a sad existence for a little girl. To see all the others on the playground at recess. They’d chase each other around, push one another on the swings, flirt innocently while playing tag. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying their young friendships and learning about how those relationships work. But Mia would sit alone on the grass in a torn dress, picking dandelions and trying to turn them into palaces inside her mind.
She loved it in there because the real world was so frightening. It was a world spiraling out of control. A world filled with terrifying terms that she didn’t fully understand. Words like, sole custody, and therapist, and failure. It felt like everybody and everything in her life was fighting or screaming or forming secret alliances against her like some kind of sick reality game show where the winner got to publicly shame her in front of a live studio audience.
You see, as a child, Mia possessed the ability to slide into a dream. She could play for a little while in the only world that embraced her. And when she decided she’d had her fill, she eased back into the woken world like calm bay waters gliding over the sand. Back then Mia was blessed with the gift of lucid dreaming.
In her dreams she’d design magical flowing dresses, linen ones with purple and yellow flowers that would blow easily in a crisp Caribbean breeze. Dresses sewn by hand in seaside shops run by master seamstresses. Little Mia could venture blithely into fantastical foreign piazzas with large medieval towers extending into the cloudless pink morning skies. In her dreams she was beautiful and that beauty attracted crowds of gentlemen in black topcoats and primped gentlewomen adorned in white Victorian dresses with braided chignon updos. And when Mia would spin in her dreams the colors of her dresses would spin together like Technicolor cream being spooned into black coffee, defying the prisms of the natural world. Her dresses could transport her to another time. Her dresses could transport her to another place. Places absent of burden.
Every night while snuggled in her bed, her head resting on her soft pillow, every night while Mia’s little body was draped in warm quilts, she’d escape from the torment of her sad reality and retire back into her dreams to try on another magical dress, a ticket to another magical world wrapped in gentle scores of instrumental arias.
In her dreams Mia possessed the facility to construct an abstract universe within her mind. The absolute control of those figmental waters allowed her to will the waves to crest over the seawalls of reality so that when she woke and wandered our world, she did so with a romantic abandon that made her seem detached from others. Even as she grew, whenever Mia went to the grocers, or waited on line at the bank, or picked up her dry cleaning, or filled up her tank at the gas station, she performed such menial chores wrapped in a kind of magical cloak that she imagined would protect her from all of the looming dangers out there.
When Mia first met Lester, shortly after her twenty fourth birthday, he was so handsome and charming that she feared she had dreamed him into existence. She’d look into his enamored eyes and wondered if his adoration was an affection of her own design. You see boys had never paid her much attention and Lester was gorgeous. He was a successful architect. He wore a suit and tie even on casual Fridays or when taking leisurely, elbow- locked walks through the park with Mia. Even their wedding felt like a fairytale scene from one of her lucid dreams.
On that perfect July afternoon, she glided down a rose -petal ornamented aisle to the admiring gasps of her guests, wearing an ivory strapless drop-waist A line gown embroidered with feathered tulle flowers and garnished with a lilac horsehair sash. Lester, stood with a resigned strength in his posture under a flowered alter framed by two majestic Magnolia trees in mid- bloom.
But a terrible thought sprouted in Mia that day while stepping toward the altar. She was infected with a kind of impostor syndrome. Fearful that she somehow wasn’t deserving of Lester’s affection. It all seemed too good to be true. During those early days with Lester the world seemed like Mia’s oyster, like every day would bring a new pearl for her to admire and she hoped there’d be a million more unencumbered days to follow.
But there weren’t.
Mia O’Neal awoke alone some time later from unsettled dreams. They’d all been that way since the last of her three children was born a little over two years ago. She laid in a trance on sheets that hadn’t been changed in almost a month, no longer treating her bedding with reverence as she once had. Lost in the emptiness of her morning malaise, she tried to imagine being a little girl again, wiggling her toes together while draping herself in the dreamy freedom of a life yet to be lived. Mia sniffled in the stale bedroom air. Like an explorer she silently charted the heaviness of the day’s burdens. Latitudes of tedious laundry. Longitudes of colorless cleaning.
The night before, her youngest, Genevieve crawled into bed with her momma to escape a frightening nightmare. Mia’s little visitor interrupted an uncontrolled, yet lovely, sexual tryst that she’d been observing somewhere deep in her dreams. Her now overweight, balding, and infuriatingly wonderful husband Lester became lean and muscular and handsome again like when they first met. Lester had suddenly grown back his luscious sandy brown hair. He was in a tuxedo as they rendezvoused on the outdoor patio of a European cafe under starry skies painted in blues and yellows like a Van Gogh. Just as Mia was settling in to the loveliness of that scene, she caught an elbow in the face and woke with a startle.
She spent hours tossing and turning, but Lester’s guttural snoring kept her awake. He blamed the affliction on his large tonsils. His doctor blamed it on Lester’s obesity. The alarm would sound in a few hours and Lester, the early riser, would pop up excitedly with another of his corny aphorisms like, let’s to it then, or the early bird catches the worm, or the world is your oyster. But the world wasn’t Mia’s oyster. Not anymore. She labored to will herself back to sleep, back into the fantasy of her romantic European rendezvous. But she couldn’t.
Mia was so tired that she couldn’t ascertain what was real and what was just another illusion beyond her control. She rolled over to look out through the windows. The morning sun hidden behind heavy gray rain clouds. That grayness weighed heavily, clouding Mia in a sadness so thick that she couldn’t seem to escape it. Then a familiar echo of phantom giggles arrived from the family room followed by the silly sounds of morning cartoons. She felt at ease if only for a moment.
Mia tried to go back to sleep.
Every single time she closed her eyes, she struggled to regain the control that she once delighted in. For over a decade now she’d been lost in a tempest with the rising waters swelling over her life raft. For over a decade now, having lost her oars, she’d been forced to move with the swells just rocking up and down, up and down, over and over again scanning out into the distance for any sign of the island utopia she once constructed. It was a nightmare that never seemed to end.
Mia stretched out. She bent down to touch her toes. Those toes dug into the taupe carpeting matted with a minefield of stains that range from chocolate pudding to fruit punch to projectile vomit. She tried to recall the yoga technique her girlfriend Amabella demonstrated last week over café au laits in a rant of dizzying pretention only possible by one who is beautiful and unburdened. Amabella so graceful and athletic. She had elegantly styled smooth black hair. Perfectly parted with a few intentionally loose strands that fell delicately over her unblemished porcelain skin.
Mia watched Amabella looking at her. She watched her friend pretending not to see Mia’s split ends, or the stains under the armpits of her blouse, or the small hole behind the knee in her tights or the throbbing pimple above her unplucked eyebrow- a minor blemish that she perceived to be mountainous. Each conversation with Amabella reinforced another of her insecurities and made her feel more and more like a punctured balloon slowly deflating.
Mia once learned in her Transcendental Meditation class about a reflective breathing technique that was meant to calm her chi. She attempted to remember it to no avail. Mia hasn’t availed in much of late. Her analyst told her she needed to continue to, work on herself. But work is hard. Mia had just given up instead. It was much easier that way.
She’d taken to roaming the apartment each day in a pair of torn gray jogging pants. All of her ‘post-it’ noted to-do lists left unfinished. Mia’s dirty laundry piled in the dusty corner of her bedroom. The clean laundry strewn recklessly, unfolded in half- open dresser drawers. Two towers of soiled dishes remain caked in three-day old congealed meat fat in the kitchen sink, leaning against one another like a nauseating Colossus of Rhodes.
Mia rubbed her eyes, hoping when they open again, she’d see the world differently. That she’d be able to return to the dreamworlds of her childhood. Every morning she questioned how to make her powers return. What if I just go? What if I hop in the Range Rover and take off? I could leave Lester and the kids and just drive forever. But then she’d feel ashamed to have even entertained such notions. And besides, Mia was a mother. There was no escape from that, as the scope of such a charge would always linger between the oxygen and carbon in her air.
The grayness of this life- she was shackled to it like a prisoner of her own despair. It was inescapable. So, Mia permitted herself to wander into her if onlys.
If only she could get away. If only she could paint over this drab canvas with a more vibrant scene. If only she could disappear into her dreams again. If only. And all of those lovely if onlys got Mia through her days. But today, her if onlys were interrupted by an all too familiar squeal.
The children were in the family room, bug- eyed in front of an enormous screen devouring sugary cereals with their sticky hands. They hurled insults at one another while enthusiastically consuming a program rife with cartoon brutality on the television.
It was time for Mia to get into character. It was time for her to play momma. Though she secretly wished she’d tried out for a meatier role, one where her name would’ve been placed in lights up on the marquis. But those days are long gone. The screams continued. Mia couldn’t take it any longer, the chaos compelled her to reach out for the doorknob. But it was gone.
Strands of loose hair flipped out of her ponytail. Mia spun toward the wall of windows. They were gone. Dry- walled over somehow while she was sleeping. Mia rushed toward her bathroom. The way that the cool marble tiles felt on her bare feet, the warmth of the candles surrounding the tub, and the luminous reflection of the soft lighting on the clean white surfaces had the power to, no matter her despair, arouse in her a fleeting measure of serenity. She opened the bathroom door and walked in only to fall out somewhere else entirely.
Mia stood in the doorway of Antonio’s, an overpriced Italian restaurant that her family frequented each Thursday night after the twin’s karate class. She caught her reflection in the long mirror that adorns the back wall. She was still wearing her smelly, gray sweatpants and coffee-stained white camisole. Mia wondered how she got here?
Her eyes bounced around the room seeking a confirmation that what she saw was real. The heavy red upholstered booths were there. The small table lamps were there lit with fake electric candles as always. She saw the ironed white linen tablecloths, the polished silverware, the spotless wineglasses. All there as she remembered it. Even the overpowering aroma of truffles.
Chef Antonio loved truffles. He’d often come to the table with one in hand and speak whimsically to the children in Italian about their splendor. Antonio loved truffles so much, in fact, that diners would be hard pressed to find any item on his menu that didn’t prominently feature the delicacy in one form or another. Mia’s kids hated truffles.
And she saw them there, her family, sitting at their regular Thursday night corner booth. She saw the children. The boys in their unwashed karate uniforms and Genevieve in her stained Cinderella costume that she wore everywhere. She saw dimpled and pig- tailed Genevieve asking the waiter for chocolate milk and then sobbing upon learning, yet again, that they didn’t have chocolate milk at Antonio’s. She saw the boys punching each other while Lester checked his text messages from work. She saw the four of them pouncing on the breadbasket when it arrived as if they were a pack of ravenous animals thirsting for carbs. She saw the children. Like twitchy back-alley addicts standing around flaming garbage cans, itching for a tablet or a phone or a smart watch or a screen of any kind to finger and swipe. The kids form a united front, begging their father for another hit. They threaten to cause a scene should they be denied. Lester didn’t stage much of a fight. He promptly distributed the devices before ordering a martini.
Mia watched them. As an outsider. Uncertain of why she needed them so. She guessed it was those involuntary memories that surfaced from time to time. Memories of when they snuggled up with her on the couch and wrapped their little limbs around her body. Memories of when they arrived into the world, the way their smooth new skin met hers, the way their rhythmic breathing paired with hers, the way she could feel their little heart beats trying to match her own as if they were still one.
The kids still snuggle with Lester. But Mia wasn’t like Lester. Lester was patient and doted on even their most mediocre traits. He was deliberate and tempered with his discipline. He was close to a perfect father and pretty close to a perfect husband. And Mia hated him for it.

Lester was wearing a suit and tie right from the office. He was about to order. An involuntary force drew Mia toward them. As she prepared to sit, she caught a whiff of her husband. When they first met, he smelled delicious, like a blend of vanilla and possibility. After twelve years she’d realized that the scent was just Drakkar Noir.
Lester didn’t acknowledge Mia as she sat.
A waiter approached. Dressed in a tuxedo but the face was distorted, as if someone had erased all of the features. No eyes. No nose. No mouth. The face smudgy. Sunken. Macabre.
Mia looked up at this grotesque figure.
“Is this a dream?” she asked.
Lester didn’t acknowledge her. He didn’t even comment on the haunting traits of the waiter; he just ordered their meal.
“The kids will have the tortellini with the lemon butter sauce. And please no truffles.”
“It’s every time we dine here Lester,” Mia said employing her default tone with Lester. A sprinkle of condescension. A dash of outright disgust.
“I’m sure it’s a mistake, dear.”
“Every week?”
“We can’t learn without making mistakes,” Lester said. Another of his aphorisms.
Mia rolled her eyes. The only adage she could think of was, I’ve made my bed and now I’ve got to lie in it.
“Every week they pull this shit with the mushrooms and then the kids won’t eat the pasta.”
“Truffles,” Lester corrected.
“What?”
“You said mushrooms, love. They’re truffles.”
“Oh, you know what I meant you twat!”
Mia was causing a scene. But Lester wasn’t embarrassed. He just looked affectionately at his disheveled wife as if she were draped in Armani.
Silence followed. Her boys were on Lester’s tablet, quietly hypnotized by a program about wild animals that transform into robots in order to start a rebellion against an international fur conglomerate. Genevieve was playing a game on Lester’s phone where the user must capture a variety of wild animals from the jungle and place them into cages before the time expires. Mia wondered if the cages belong to the same international fur conglomerate from the boy’s game. Meanwhile, Lester quietly watched his children with a goofy grin on his face as if the argument with his wife moments earlier never happened. He took deep, meditative breaths while Mia tried to subdue the volcanic ire that intensified every time she looked at her husband.
Mia checked her watch. It stopped.
Looking at the table to her left, she saw a sweaty gentleman with a paunchy gut trying to free itself from the bondage of his crimson knit sweater. The man moved his large hands through his bushy hair. His nails were freshly manicured. He spun a gold class ring around his middle finger over and over and over again. His date, and Mia presumed it to be a blind one because of her seeming disinterest in the man, squirmed in her chair, adjusted the straps of her lacy dress, and checked her phone. The man explained to her that he was a Harvard man as another warped waiter approached the table with a bottle of Cabernet. The waiter prepared to pour a tasting until the Harvard man placed his finger in the air.
“Garcon, would you happen to have a decanter?” he solicited with a heavy and possibly fake British accent.
Humiliated, his date buried her face in her hands.
The waiter gestured, no.
The Harvard man received his tasting pour. He placed his face deep inside of the bowl of the glass taking a cartoonishly large inhalation. Then the man slugged down the entirety of the pour, swirled it around in his mouth audibly before he spit it back into the glass.
“It’s a passable Cab but it’s probably better suited for the spring. A clean glass please, garcon.”
His date checked her watch. It stopped.
Mia looked to her right. Huddled in a dark booth at the corner of the dining room, a young couple that looked like they were cut out of a fashion magazine gazed into one another’s eyes. They held hands. They smiled seductively. They spoke closely. The intimacy of those whispers suggesting the night would end in the bedroom.
The couple reminded Mia of her early days with Lester. Season one of their sitcom when every episode was magical and the tension of will they / won’t they permeated each line of dialogue. Every seemingly innocuous touch had the audience on pins and needles. But now Mia thought of her marriage as one of those shows that dragged for too many seasons and like the rest of the audience, she just wanted it to end already.
The young lovers were in the throes of a spirited debate over the age of a drooling baby on the other side of the restaurant.
“How old’s that one? A boy, right?” the man asked.
“A girl. I’d say 39 months,” the woman replied while fidgeting with the neckline of her new lilac chiffon gown.
“39 months? You mean three years?” he asked, taking a hearty sip of white wine.
“No, I mean 39 months,” she corrected him taking a daintier sip.
“Well how old am I then, Janet?”
“You’re 24, William.”
“Are you sure I’m not 250 months, Janet?”
“Yes William. I’m sure. And it’d be 288 months you knob.”
The woman checked her watch. It stopped.
The waiter, menacing in its ambiguity, returned with the family’s meals. Mia’s carbonara was skillfully plated with a garnish of Pecorino Romano cheese and shaved truffles. Lester ogled his fettuccini al Antonio, the one with garlic oil, sautéed shrimp, chopped Italian parsley, all tossed in a truffle cream sauce. Heaping plates of buttery noodles were placed in front of the children with mounds of Parmesan cheese grated over the top. Mixed within the cheesy bundles were tiny black flakes of, sure enough, truffles.
The children nosed the pasta. They made faces as if they’d just been presented a plate of manure before launching into a barrage of whines. As the screams crescendo, the frightening waiter placed a tall glass of red wine in front of Mia. Even with no eyes it felt as if he was staring right at her.
Mia turned towards Lester. She looks looked at him with wide eyes and a trembling lip.
And as if Lester knew what she was going to ask, he said, “This isn’t a dream, Mia.”
She took a heavy gulp from the glass.
Lester had dripped cream sauce on his tie. He had dripped some more cream sauce on his trousers. He made vulgar slurping noises with his mouth. Mia wasn’t sure, but she was fairly certain this was the most repulsive act she’d ever witnessed a man perform.
“Lester, you’re a pig. You’ve gotten sauce all over yourself. You’ll smell of truffles all evening.”
He shrugged his shoulders and continued shoveling down the pasta while the children persisted with their staged mutiny. Mia couldn’t bare it any longer. She couldn’t bare how animated they all were. She couldn’t bare the incessant nagging of her children. She couldn’t bare the muted agony of her husband’s good nature.
Mia chugged down the last of her wine and launched the empty glass against the mirror, shattering it in a wild scene of exacerbated ferocity. She flung her chair backward and stood. Bending over the table, Mia clenched her fists and screamed out before stomping off toward the back of the restaurant.
But something deep within her caused her to pause her rebellion. She stopped suddenly, turning back to the table. Lester got up, preparing to embrace his wife and welcome her back to their fold with open arms. But when she finally reached him, she picked up his plate of creamy truffled noodles, grit her teeth, and rubbed the dish deeply into his face. Then Mia placed the empty plate back on the table, took a deep Transcendentally Meditative breath and retreated to the restroom. To rest.
Mia turned on the faucet and splashed her face with the cool water. Looking into the mirror she engaged with her reflection for a while. She tied her hair back to investigate the loose skin on her forehead, the crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes. She felt removed from herself, like an orphan in her own skin. And she wondered where the real Mia had gone.
There was an anguish that accompanied her life, half over and fully unfulfilled. A crippling disappointment that spread inside her like a cancer and Mia was beginning to fear that it was too far along to be cured. She resigned herself to the melancholy of the familiar. Wiping her face with a towel, she took one last look in the mirror before returning to the source of her despair.
The dining room was still dark as the faceless waiters in their tuxedos shuffled by. The Harvard man was standing up, reaching inside his overstuffed wallet to pay the bill. Meanwhile his date was swiping away on her phone, looking for another man to meet up with on an app that she frequented when feeling lonely. The handsome couple remained in their booth trying to disguise their canoodling, having apparently put their quarrel to rest.
Mia thought it may be time to put her quarrels to rest and bury the smoldering animosity she harbored toward her family. She felt ready to start over again. She walked back toward Lester and the kids but when Mia arrived at the table, they were gone.
A panic began to stir. Mia scanned the restaurant in alarm. The room had grown darker and the vivid faces of the diners; the Harvard man, his disinterested date, the kissing couple in the corner, had all warped into twisted splotches of undefined flesh.
Mia rushed back toward the ladies’ room. The diners all moved like zombies rising from the grave, slowly obstructing her path. They wretched with deep, guttural groans and grabbed hold of her arms so tightly they punctured the skin. A shadowy man in a chef coat writhed at her feet, reaching up and grabbing hold of her thighs. Mia tried to squirm free. Yet with each desperate movement the figures, overcome with bloodlust, held on more forcefully.
The bodies dragged Mia down onto the cold marble tiles. The clawing intensified. She feared this was the end. And at the end, it was not Amabella’s beauty that she longed for. It was not her lost power of lucid dreaming either. It was not even that instinctual urge to escape. To survive. It was her if onlys.
If only she could see Lester one last time to tell him how much she loved him. If only she could hold him one last time and whisper softly in his ear that she was sorry. If only she could see her children again. If only she could hold them again, could once again feel the powerful weight of their need.
The bodies of the demented diners piled on top of her. She couldn’t breathe. The mass of their united rage felt as if it would push her through the floor into some kind of subterranean prison. Before giving in forever she remembered the pleas of her maternity nurses, “one last push, Mia.”
One last push allowed Mia to wrench herself free. She scrambled on all fours to escape the menacing horde but the mob continued their pursuit. She managed to crawl in under the flap of the linen tablecloth and take in a single moment of refuge before crawling out on the other side back onto her own bathroom.
Sunshine burst in through the large windows of Mia’s bedroom as she slid back into her bed. The warm covers brought up to her slender neck, she snuggled in and drifted away. And deep within the recesses of her slumbering mind the symphony finally returned. It felt like a sealed vault had been reopened and the treasured stockpile of Mia’s imagination allowed to explode freely once again. The first new construction that she composed was her own home in which she slept. Every drop of paint, every loose nail and carpet stain and strewn toy, likely to be tripped on, returned to exactly where they belong. Mia built her children again from scratch, cell by cell, just like the first time she built them. She placed those treasures in front of the television to shout while Lester read the paper, a carefree smile plastered on his face.
After a long time, Mia finally woke from a gluttonous sleep. She popped out of bed and stretched her graceful limbs allowing the afternoon sun to wash over her warm body. The giggles of her children echoed throughout the house. Lester’s chuckle echoed back. Mia smiled.
But then came, “It’s our turn now Genny! You just watched your show! Give me the clicker! Genny!” Followed by, “Ouchie! That hurts Theo! Daddy, Theo punched me!” Followed by, “She started it, Daddy! Genny won’t give us the clicker!”
The screaming had begun. Mia remembered her Transcendental Meditation. She breathed in. She cleared her mind. Her mind was clear. And in the abyss of that reflective state another one of Lester’s mantras popped into her thoughts, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Mia O’Neal was tired of the same. Tired of feeling lobotomized by her unhappiness. Tired of resenting those who love her the most. Tired of living in a world of if onlys. She was tired of giving up. Tired. It was time to wake up.
Mia marched into her closet, flipping through the racks of hoodies and stained t shirts. She found the sleeveless scarlet Valentino midi from her honeymoon. Mia slid it on, and the memory of the fabric against her skin returned her to a more uncluttered time. She slipped on her cherry red Channel slingback heels. She brushed her hair. She put on a little eyeliner, a touch of mascara and some lipstick.
Mia looked at herself in the mirror and could finally see herself again. She reached for the door, turned the knob and left.