This was a dream within a dream.
I was going shopping with my whole family: me, my mother, my father, my sister, her husband, my niece, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin and her husband.
The city I lived in all my life looked different as we explored it on foot. It was industrial, more dark glass and steel rods than the old brick I knew. Next to a tall corporate building with blue-tinted windows, cartoonishly villainous, there was a flea market, dirt on the ground and selling nothing but long skirts organised by colour.
Throughout this shopping trip I kept having flashes of memories of having attended a party. We were in a dark event venue, luxurious and mysterious (because you couldn’t see a thing, honestly), and my aunt was singing on a small stage wearing a black flapper dress. The venue looked like the inside of the oak cabinets at home that I used to play with growing up. I would put my toys inside and arrange their houses, doilies for carpets, books for dividing walls, flower vases for extravagant decor. My aunt too looked like she had a gigantic white tulip in a black vase behind her.
I searched and searched the cabinets, the drawers and our photo albums for evidence of this night, but there was none.
As we continued walking around and looking for shops, my mom found a hair salon, with a red velvet drape instead of a door. Everybody turned to my aunt to tell her she can freshen up her perm, but right at that moment she was talking on the phone. When I turned to look into the salon again, she had teleported inside, already in the seat.
The owner of the salon presented us her establishment, explained the Mediterranean aesthetic and showed us they even had a stone shower with dark green product bottles.
I pulled my sister to the side and again asked her about the mystery of the dark event venue I was so certain my aunt performed at, but nobody else could remember. She suggested that maybe it was a dream and my brain was confusing it with memories. I said “oh.” and woke up seconds later.

…

A. R. Tivadar is a hobby writer from Romania and a graduate of the University of Oradea. She has been published in Alien Buddha Press, miniMAG, Motus Audax Press, Firework Stories and 9 other online literary magazines.

instagram: @a.r.tivadar
linktree: /ARTivadar