01.31.2025: Dream

Eli Osei

Mother and father were fighting. I’m in my dream. They were in different places. They had been in different places for a long time, physically, I mean. I was with father. Whenever I called mother he pretended not to be there. In my dream we own landlines. There was a black one and a brown one. The black phone was the one we usually called mother on, but we had not called for a long time. The brown phone rang. A voice spoke and it was mother. I had expected it to be someone else—someone who father had fucked. My face changed and father realised who it was. He shook his head no, and I wanted to listen, but then I heard my voice. It said: “Yes, dad, it’s mum. Would you like to speak to her? Oh, okay. Hold on.”

He mouthed, “Wow...Very good...Very good,” and then reached out to grab his wife.

Eli Osei is a student at Yale University. Eli is a writer from Johannesburg, and an editorial intern at LARB.

ABOUT THE ART | Study for Breathing by Cleo Maloney, 2025. Cleo Maloney is a student at Yale University.