Critters at the Keyboard Welcomes J.J. (James) DiBenedetto Author of Dream Child
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"I
would give anything to take this away from her. I would gladly go
back to having the nightmares myself – the very worst ones, the ones that had
me waking up screaming in a pool of my own vomit – rather than see Lizzie go
through this..."
As a resident at Children's Hospital, Sara can handle
ninety hour workweeks, fighting to save her young patients from deadly
childhood diseases. But she's about to be faced with a challenge that all
her training and experience haven't prepared her for: her four-year-old
daughter has inherited her ability to see other people's dreams...
"Dream
Child" is the suspenseful third novel in the "Dreams" series.
Excerpt (from
Dream Child, book 3)
Sara looks down, and
she’s surprised to see her belly rather than her feet. She had no idea she would get this big this
fast. It wasn’t like this the last time,
with Lizzie, she thinks. But then, she
reminds herself, Lizzie was just one - this time it’s two.
Sara walks into
Lizzie’s room, where her daughter is sitting up in her bed, playing with a very
old, very ratty stuffed rabbit.
“Lizzie, honey? Mommy needs to talk to you,” Sara says, and Lizzie
sets Mister Pennington aside and looks up.
Sara sees her own eyes staring at her, something that she wonders if
she’ll ever get used to. She sits down
on the bed, pats Lizzie on the head.
“You know your friend Marnie?”
Lizzie continues to look intently at Sara and nods her head up and down
several times. “You know how she has a
baby brother?” Lizzie continues to nod,
not breaking eye contact with Sara. Sara
wonders if this was how she was with her mother.
She’s about to
continue when someone else walks into Lizzie’s room. Sara turns, but she knows before she does who
she’ll see, and she knows - even though she’s never experienced this side of it
before – exactly what’s going on.
Her daughter stands in
the doorway, looking at Sara and another version of herself as well. Sara doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t want
to scare Lizzie. Lizzie looks at herself
briefly, but the image of herself seems to hold no interest. She focuses on Sara, concentrating all her
three-year-old attention span on her mother.
“You’re so big,
Mommy!”
***
Where’s Lizzie? She
was standing in the doorway. She was –
oh, my God.
She was seeing – she was inside – she saw me dreaming. She’s got it just like I do.
I jump out of bed and I have to hold myself back from running
into her room in a panic. I don’t want
to frighten her. She can’t possibly
realize what just happened. She can’t
know what it means. I take several deep
breaths, collect myself as best I can, and then I walk slowly, calmly, into her
room.
She’s sitting up on her bed.
She fixes her gaze on me, just like she did in the dream, concentrating
on me with all her might. “Mommy, I had
a funny dream.”
“I know you did, honey.
Can you tell me about it?” I sit
next to her, also just like the dream.
“You were big. Really
big. You sat like now, on the bed. You were really big.”
I hug her, kiss her forehead. “That is
a funny dream. But I’m not big, not for
real. It was just a dream.” I can’t even imagine how I’m going to explain
what happened to her. I’m concentrating
on keeping my voice calm and level and soothing, and that takes all my
effort.
J.J. (James) DiBenedetto was born in Yonkers, New York. He
attended Case Western Reserve University, where as his classmates can attest,
he was a complete nerd. Very little has changed since then.
He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia with his beautiful
wife and their cat (who has thoroughly trained them both). When he's not
writing, James works in the direct marketing field, enjoys the opera,
photography and the New York Giants, among other interests.
The "Dreams" series
is James' first published work.
Dream student
Dream Doctor
Dream Child
Dream Family
All four books are also
available at:
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