“Look, seer. You must understand.” Frank’s voice was far away, words spoken through a tin can tied to a string.

“Where am I?” Jeremy asked, squinting against the bright sunshine. There was no sign of his father or his old bedroom and the fury inside him had melted away. He had not had the nightmare in months, but something had brought it back, except he was awake this time. At least, he thought he was. When he first left home, he woke almost every night, gasping for breath, convinced he was still lying in his bed, before recognizing it for a dream. He really had escaped his father’s wrath and mother’s guilt, and the cult of belief that pushed them farther from reality each day. He walked away. But his sister, she was still there, and even though she was indoctrinated with their faith and all the hate that came with it, could he have done something to help her see past it? Should he have stayed?

“It was Abe’s bite,” Frank said, standing next to him now. “It brought your fear to the front, made it ten times worse. But you’re safe here, not back with them.”

He looked down and the makeshift bandage and his throbbing wound were gone, nothing but smooth skin. “Is this a dream?”

“We see ourselves as we need to in this place,” Frank said. Jeremy looked at him, standing just a few feet away.

“What did you do to me?”

Frank nodded to the field stretching out in front of them. A massive, ancient tree with gnarled branches that swept out in every direction, cast jagged shadows over the grass. He smelled hay and livestock from somewhere close. A few horses stood beside the tree, next to a group of men. It was warm and the prairie grass swayed in a summer breeze. Looking back to Frank, he saw that the hole in his stomach had vanished, just like his own wound.

“Where are we?”

“We’re still in Ardmore. When is a better question, white man.”

“Are we really here?” Jeremy ran his fingertips over the skin where his wound used to be.

“When I close my eyes, this is where I go.”

“We’re dreaming,” Jeremy said, looking up to the scene in front of him.

“Awake or sleeping, the places we visit are all here,” Frank said, pointing to his ruined skull. In the field, the group of men stepped apart, and Jeremy saw another Frank. But this Frank was a mutilated form lying on the ground, a long rope wound around his neck.

“That’s a hanging tree,” Jeremy whispered. He didn’t know where the words came from, but he knew it was true.

“You see,” Frank said beside him. “Most people don’t.”

“You relive this every time you close your eyes?”

“The illusion of time doesn’t matter to a spirit and it’s our nature to visit the events that keep us here.”

Jeremy watched as a man grabbed the other Frank’s collar, hauling him to his feet. He was only semi-conscious. Jeremy was sure he was already dying. His skull was shattered, his scalp peeled back. Dark purple and black bruises covered his face, and one eye was swollen nearly completely shut. The men laughed and cursed and joked. Hanging him was just for sport at this point.

“Do all ghosts move through time?” Jeremy asked, wishing he could look away from the scene, but he was transfixed, fascinated. And it wasn’t just the horror of it all, it was their antique clothes, the horses, the smell of fresh air, and the thought of standing in the great plains more than one hundred years ago.

“Your mind creates time,” Frank said. “When you lose your body, there’s nothing holding you in one place and it will do what it will.” The men hauled the other Frank up to the tree and threw the rope over a limb.

“Why can’t you stop coming here?”

The men tied one side of the rope to the horn of a saddle on a large white horse with brown spots.

“I would like to,” Frank said. “Believe me. I know these men are long dead. I have no more rage to level against them for what they did. I know my life was over long ago. But my mind keeps coming back here. To the end. I carried so much regret and shame with me to the grave.”

“But it wasn’t your fault.”

“My shame wasn’t for trying to belong in their world or sleeping with a white woman, it was for leaving my own people behind. I had to die to see that the white man’s reason and intellect are an illusion. We know things here,” Frank said, tapping his finger on his chest, before tapping it on his exposed skull, “not here.”

Jeremy thought he understood. He couldn’t rationalize the things he had seen in his life with the words in books, either. They helped, the libraries in small towns with books about religion and psychology, but they weren’t the answer. Those pages didn’t capture the identity of the people chanting in his small country church, grasping assault rifles and bibles, one in each hand. Friendly gray-haired ladies that would offer you pie and a smile as vile judgments about other people fell from their lips.

And since he wasn’t allowed to have a phone or internet access of any kind while he was living at home, once he was free, he dove into the online world. Except there, he found his small-town church all over again. Groups of people spinning webs of reality for only themselves. The phone went into his pack after a few weeks of that, only for emergencies. A 911 call if he was in dire straits, though he hadn’t needed it yet. The only thing that kept the demons at bay for Jeremy was to walk by himself. To pound the pavement with his feet and see the world with his own eyes. Not the eyes of his father, not through the lens of skin color or an unyielding God.

In the field before him, beside the tree, Jeremy watched a man lead the white and brown horse, taking the tension out of the rope. The other Frank’s hands were bound in front of him now and he sagged against the shoulder of the man holding him. Jeremy’s breath caught, imagining the panic he must have felt as his airway was cut off. The man let go and the other Frank jerked violently against the taut rope. Jeremy looked away, but the Frank beside him tapped his shoulder, pointing back to the scene.

“Watch,” he said.

“I don’t want to watch you die,” Jeremy said.

“Learn.”

Jeremy looked back from the corner of his eye. The rope’s knot was at the back of Frank’s neck, and he was leaning almost to the ground now. Jeremy cringed and turned his head but the other Frank’s hand on his shoulder steadied him.

“I can’t watch this.”

“It’s the only way.”

Jeremy made a whimpering sound but continued to watch. The horse took a step and Frank’s body jerked up about a foot. The men whooped and hollered around him, slinging curses and insults. Jeremy clenched his fists, his revulsion overtaken by anger. How could they? How could anyone…he took a step forward and his vision blurred for a moment, shadows pressing in on him.

As he blinked them away, his breath came in ragged gasps, and warm blood poured down his face in a steady stream. His life, the life of Jeremy the wanderer, fell into the background and he stared down at the vivid green grass below him, his red blood spilling down like paint on brightly textured canvas. He remembered a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and faded blue dress sitting on a blanket. The same grass. The same clear day. Under the same tree. Her smile lit up the world around her as she gazed at him. He was enthralled, even though he knew he was just an oddity to her.

“Dirty Indian,” she said, glaring at him later, her white teeth gleaming as she pleaded with her brother and his friends. “I was just being polite to the wretch, and he took advantage of me.” As he gazed down, his pain forgotten, the sound of his gasping breath far away, he watched her brother’s boot plow into his stomach. He tried to push himself up, but it was no use as others joined in.

Back in the moment, the rope went slack, and his boots hit the ground. Air rushed into his lungs, excruciating through his ruined throat. But a split second later, stars danced in his vision, and he imagined a snapping noise as the rope hoisted him into the air again. The sweaty flanks of the white and brown horse flexed as the animal unknowingly delivered his death.

The ground dropped further away, and his legs flailed. The knot at the back of his neck was a fiery vice clenching his spine. He thought he heard himself groan but the excited calls of the white men around him drowned everything out. A sudden fury built up in him but just as suddenly fell away. There would be no revenge for him, no court of law, no justice. Her brother and his friends would walk away and live their lives. Farming and raising children. For him, there was only this. There could only be this.