I smell the peanut shells turn brown. My mother turns, opens the oven door, and shakes them. Some turn over, specks of black on the undersides appearing.

"A large white ball rushes fiercely down a steep hill. It is soft, spongy, porous. But it's not gravity propelling it. It's being driven from inside by an appetite to devour. In the front, in its path, is its prey. A small, frightened black ball. Hard and shiny, like coal." She's telling me another version of her recurring dream.

"This time it wasn't like before. But then, every ending is always different." This dream first appeared when she was around my age. Since then it's managed to possess her sleep, mysteriously popping up in her dreams at its own will, especially when she least expects it.

This particular dream arrived the night before, leaving her in such pain today that she's forced to recount its horror. She often uses me to tell her dreams to, only because she has no friends she trusts with her vulnerability. She doesn't trust me either, but I am a child and weaker than she. So, without my permission, she forces me to listen to her nightmares.

"Last night," she continues, "the white ball caught the black one, swallowing it . . . whole." She pauses for effect as her hands shape a circle. "Like an amoeba," she dramatizes, "capturing something helpless, surrounding it, and then slowly sucking the life out of it--for food." Her metaphor of eating comes naturally. She's now shelling the roasted peanuts, popping them whole into her mouth and chewing them up with a tremendous gusto. "Yep, it gulped that tiny ball whole, leaving no trace."

I shudder.

Outside the kitchen window it's winter. The sky is a single opaque cloud painting its entire expanse a full-on gray. Slivers of arctic winds stream through tiny cracks in the tightly shut windows. Clusters of bare tree branches reach hungrily through the cold to the notion of a sun above.

My mother's determined to use her talk and me to get to some other side--a side unknown to me. But I don't ask about that; I've learned to be silent when she's like this. Stealing a look at her, I realize she's no longer present at our table. I follow her gaze out the window on up to the motionless sky. Here I pause to squint. There is absolutely nothing out there before us. Unsettled, I grow afraid.

I am only seven years old on this biting cold day. I am terrified because my mother is teaching me how to be like her. I am learning how to be afraid, to know that any minute I could be swallowed whole. Her white ball is my world. That black ball is certainly me. And I am powerless. My hard-won essence could well be absorbed by this mighty white mass that she lays at the trembling feet of my soul.

Then it will be my turn. My energy will feed its power, help it grow bigger, stronger, better. Its digestive juices burning like acid into my disintegrating body and soul, dissolving traces of me, of my history, and of my contribution to its ever-growing capacity.

And there's more. While my mother pours out her grief, a grief too adult for me to handle, she also leaves a space between her words where I can read her unspoken message. I must face this battle alone. Of course she won't be there for me. How could she be? No one had ever been there for her. How could she possibly find any space in her heart to help me? Every ounce of her energy is locked up in her private war to remain functionally sane.

Greedily, she pushes the fear that runs rampant through every crevice of her body, invading even her most sacred boundaries, on to me. Why, it even follows her into her sleep, where the fear lurks in hidden places, watching for her to dare, even secretly, to dream. And once inside the sweetness of her dream time, it takes special pleasure in slapping her back into an embittered, sleepless reality.

Her gaze steadies; her silence stills the air. I watch her observing the inside of the sky, and I wonder where has she gone. Years later, when I'm full-grown, I'll resent her abandoning me, leaving me with the legacy of her paranoia.

But right now, in my seventh winter on this planet, I encounter Hell. It is not a vast territory of silently licking red-orange flames. It is an unforgiving dead and barren land, with a freezing north wind pushing the trees' stark-naked branches up against the frigid sky. Here I encounter my mother's eyes. I watch them die at their center.

And from where I sit, the ice harbored in the air freezes the blood in my veins.