Lost: a Short Fiction

Take a line from one of your favorite songs and make it your first sentence. (July 28, 2025, First Line Prompt.)

“i think i saw you in my sleep, darling. i think i saw you in my dreams.” (“such small hands”, la dispute.)

I think I saw you in my sleep, darling. I think I saw you in my dreams. I’ve been having the same series of dreams for months now, and it’s always the same girl in them, holding the same rabbit, whispering words in a language I don’t understand.

It’s haunting me how I see so much that I don’t comprehend, but it’s you. I think it’s you I saw in my sleep. You hold a rabbit in your arms and stare at me, your eyes dead and cold, always whispering words I cannot fathom.

But I want to.

I want to understand. Because it’s been months of these dreams, your crooked smile, my broken heart. I feel like I’m failing you somehow because you keep reappearing like a resurrection, and yet, every time, I don’t understand. I can’t understand.

You must know how stupid it makes me feel to see you each time and gaze into your hollow, empty eyes and not be able to make out a single syllable.

Every night, I see you in my dreams until one night, you’re there, and you whisper a word I recognize, “Lost,” you utter.

And before I can even begin to formulate my reply, I feel my stomach sink and I hurtle backwards into my bed and awaken.

The next night, when I dream you, your eyes glisten and don’t look so empty, and instead of speaking a foreign language, you simply say the same word again and again until it seems meaningless practically, “Lost. Lost. Lost. Lost. Lost.” Like a litany. Like a prayer.

I want to help you. Your rabbit has run away, and I ask you if your rabbit is lost. You shake your head violently.

“Lost,” you whisper again.

Darling, I want to know what is lost, but I’m starting to think it might be you.

Isabelle Palerma

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.

News!

My poem about my grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s is being published in an anthology, Forgotten Fragments of Time, to raise money and awareness about the disease, and I just found out a small press has accepted Catching Dreams, my debut novel!

They want to publish my book. My baby. The one that has been formulating in my mind since I was twelve and having vivid dreams about my grandpa after he died. The book that all began because I kept asking myself, “What if?”

They want to publish it. I never thought I’d be a traditionally published author, but here I am with a contract coming my way.