Smile in Heaven(James Joseph Sullivan) I've just had the most beautiful dream of my life. I had it once before, a long, long time ago, where memories possibly can't stretch, maybe in another life - but I had it once. Maybe when I was a child, smiling as I had it under the blankets that hugged me as I dreamed my way to other worlds I never knew existed. Maybe I cried, or laughed, or beamed till my face hurt. I know I had it some time, though. It might have been thousands of years ago, or in another universe. The dream is always in such a heart achingly beautiful place, and even the greatest artists combined, working for a million years, couldn't create that feeling in my heart that I get when I look at a painting of a snowy forest, with an icy stream, maybe even some purple trees, snow-covered foxes in the distance, possibly a little boat and a magical cave that only I am in, and I know no-ones going to come and take me away, because it's too lonely for that.

Before my dream, I was in my hut in the woods, trying to get to sleep. I tossed and turned, blew out and relit the candle time and time again, lay down on the floor, went out with no clothes on in an icy wind and even danced on the bog near my house since no-one was around, but nothing could curb the uneasiness that I felt when I reentered the silent hut. The clock was ticking anticlockwise, and I told myself that this was just a coincidence, but then again, who knows? It has a one in a million chance of doing so, what are the chances of that happening to me, to whom things never directly happen? One in a trillion?

Finally, just as I gave up, I walked slowly up to my bed, and lay down on it, and I fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow. Thank goodness. The door was ajar, and a draft was blowing in, whipping around my ankles, but I didn't care. I was asleep. Then, the fear started. I found myself in a hut just like the one I'm in at the moment, but it was cluttered with furniture and a good way smaller, giving the feeling that you were trapped inside quite vividly to me as I looked wildly around. It was all very realistic. The curtains were so dusty that I could see specks of dust floating in the air, old chairs stacked on top of one another, cobwebs hanging like barriers across the ceiling, spiders the sides of hands in them. I sneezed a couple of times, my throat itching terribly as dust settled on my clothes. Then, since it was a dream and things always move very quickly in a dream, the walls started to close in around me, and I panicked, flinging pieces of furniture out of the way in a manner so familiar to me that I wondered if I'd had exactly the same dream the last time. My arms ached after a while as the walls creaked slowly towards me, crushing whole tables and pianos as I gasped for breath, throwing things out of the way only to have them bounce back at me, grazing my elbows, and yet I couldn't find the little door that I knew would let me out.

"Please? Where's the door? You've got to help me! I'm stuck! I need to get out!" I gasped at a shriveled old kitten on the floor.

The kitten turned towards me and pointed a paw at the wall, and then the walls came so close to me that one wall was on the back of my head and the other was on my nose. I tried to flap my arms to get out of the way, but I couldn't, and I screamed. Then the wall started to very slowly crush my nose, and then the wall opened to reveal the prettiest forest of my life: the one I've been aching for all my life.

A blast of cold air swept across me, realistic as real life, even though in a dream, as I grappled with my senses as the hut disappeared behind me, the walls swallowing each other up. The porch was windswept and in my pajamas I shivered, crossing my arms over one another. My teeth chattered, and soon my hands became numb and my nose and ears hurt, but I didn't move. Lights were strung over the snowy trees that had purple leaves on them, and the same icy stream I've been longing for swung between the trees. The banks had beavers and foxes on them, and I whooped with joy but they didn't care.

It was at this point that I realized that I was naked. I covered my body with my hands, and hid behind a tree. All of a sudden, the forest was quiet. The billowing, howling, whooshing wind was all I could hear, and the cheep-cheep or squawk of a bird taking flight made the place all the more beautiful. My head rested against the bark and I sat down on the wet soil. A rabbit sniffed me and ran away, deciding I was too much of a threat. But I wasn't. I was one of them.

In the distance, I could see a light bobbing up and down between the trees, and with it a beautiful melody was sung out, and I could see people there, and I thought that I needed them to go. But then when they drew closer, I could see that they were full of warmth and love. At that point, I was filled with such loneliness, standing behind that tree in the quiet, away from everyone, that I looked up and prayed to the stars, because everyone knows our ancestors are up there. Then I stood out into the clearing, covering myself.

An old lady came up to me, and hugged me. All my embarrassment for being naked dissipated at that moment. Her walking stick pressed against my waist. Her body was frail and her hug was weak but full of warmth and love. She smelled of soap and grandmotherliness, and when we withdrew she was smiling so widely I could see every tooth in her mouth.

"We're so glad you came." she whispered, and the sound echoed past the trees.

"Why don't you join us?" a young boy asked me.

"I'm naked - I don't have any clothes on! Can I have some clothes?" I stammered.

"Oh, you won't be needing clothes! Come and join us, we're doing happiness tonight."

"And warming hearts."

"And handing out necklaces of happiness."

"Come along and join us," and I walked forwards as welcoming arms spread out around me, as the singing started again, and the path seemed to light up, and the woods seemed so far away, as I sung a tune I never knew existed, as we weaved our way to another world to tell stories to make people happy once again. It faded away, bit by bit, too wakefulness, and once I woke up, all of them had hugged me individually.

When I was back in my room, I wrote a little poem.

It's like an ice age of the heart
a golden sea, a shower of ending rain
and no matter when there's no hope left
I'll be there to kiss away the pain.

It's like a skylight in the sky
Looking up to the sky it makes me sad
that the streams of light I see before my eyes
are unknown by so many people
so far away from me,
they don't have a rainbow in the rain.

When I'm done, I put the quill down, and look at it. It's surely time to go and see Sylvia now. It's most unfortunate that I've slept for so long. She's been very strange recently. Mother died recently, and she's convinced that she can go up there to see her. She's written letters to her, immaculately coloured in with her favourite paints. She spends hours and hours colouring them in, not going over the lines, and she does it with such concentration that it's like she's trying to summon God.

"Sylvia? Darling? Where are you?" I call.
There was no answer.

"Silence!" shrieks Dorothy from the neighbouring hut. "I'm working on an important plan!"

Her plans are not ever important. One of her recent plans was to tell a colleague to dress nicely, sit on a bench by a pond and feed bits of bread to ducks. Then, five minutes later, empty a truckload of loaves all over the ducks and see the reaction, supposedly to crush some of them as a bird social experiment. Another one was to give the address of a local pub to a food supplying company, order six hundred and ten boxes of strawberries, and have them delivered to the pub where a colleague was temporarily working to assess the affects on the employees of the pub. Her most famous one for which she was jailed, was to give children a certain type of herb with which she could control their dreams and have them stand in the road, dodging cars speeding past at a speed limit of nine hundred and sixty six thousand miles per hour, while she cackled like a witch as she observed it. Dorothy was an intensely unpleasant woman.

But now, sure enough, I have to go and see Sylvia.

I opened the door of my hut, and stepped out into the night which was warmer than any night had been so far this year. It was cooler in the hut. I picked up the candle, shielded it with my arms so the glare wouldn't spread out and become too noticeable. I've got to go into the field of hay bordering the woods to see her, in her special place that only her dearest friends can ever go into. It's called the smile. it's in the shape of a smile, and you can see it if you fly overhead in a helicopter, which I once did. It's beautiful. Mostly you can just see farmers hacking away at the ground, but if you're lucky you can see a little strip, glinting, that is the entrance to the smile that you can't see from the ground. It's like I know it out of a book, off by heart, as I slip under the long grasses first, and then into the hay, reaching the little door that no one has ever spotted before.

The little sitar is there - it's been polished. When we first bought it it was on the day that I was born, and my family made me pluck a string every day that was important: my birthday, Christmas, Easter, even the day of the death of a loved one. Sometimes it was just a passing note I plucked, but I always had to do it. Then one day, Sylvia decided to show me her smile place. She asked me to play the notes in order, so with much difficulty in remembering them I did. The first note was beautiful, like the wings of a fly beating a thousand times before it came to rest, the note glided through the hay, but I knew that nobody else would be able to hear it. First, I played them backwards, from now to then, and it had a melancholy tune that I never knew existed, that made my heart ache. Then, when I played it forwards, it was the sweetest melody I'd ever heard in my life, it swooped and soared and I knew that my love for any other music but this had gone forever.

Once I'm in the smile, I sit down and Sylvia speaks.

"Mum wrote me a letter today! It's from heaven," and she passes me a letter covered in dirt. I open it, and it is from hell. How could she think that her mother was in hell?

"She's not in hell! How can you say that?" I gasped.

Sylvia smiles and says, "she ripped up your story!"

"People don't go to hell for something as small as that!" I gasp.

"They do. Your story would have made people happy!"

I'd been painting on canvas when mum had ripped up my story. I'd been painting a picture from our old house in another woods, where the snow covered the branches and the sunlight glinted in as I stroked the cat. I'd heard a tearing sound from behind me, and my book had lain in pieces. I'd promised grandma I'd keep it forever, it contained all the stories she'd written as a young girl. I cried that night, properly, for the first time in ages. I was wracked with sobs. From then on, she only told me horrible stories. Of a little boy who was kept up in a small dome. Her parents were millions of miles away, and the little, frail boy cried, for too long, pitiful tears streaming down his face: he so wanted his parents, his heart ached for it, but no matter how hard he thought or how loudly he screamed he couldn't get out of the dome, till he became old, and his hair grew so long that it took up all the space and suffocated him. I cried for that, too, but only a little.

Remembering it, I start telling Sylvia a better story, of an island so beautiful you'd want to stay there forever. But one day a boy finds a thing in the bathroom, and the plane lands and drops him off there, but the passengers inside don't notice anything strange. Then the snakes eat him up, but while he's in the snake's stomachs he writes such marvelous stories animals come from far and wide to see him.

"That's lovely" she whispers.

"Yes" I whisper back.

"Maybe mum really is in heaven."

"Yes. But we won't get to see her any more."

"D'you think mum can see us? Up there in the stars?"

"In my dream grandpapa can. Why shouldn't she be able to?"

"It's just a dream." Sylvia says.

"No, it isn't. It's a real place. I've told you about my memories, just the feeling of it. I know it."

"Well, then we can find her. The dream tells us it," Sylvia says

"What? How?" I ask her.

"Maybe there really is a heaven on Earth," she says. And then I have hope, that no matter when you're low, there's still some place that you can love and call home.

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