me.” She paused and took a deep breath letting out a long sigh. “I’ve already told Mrs. Brown that I can’t look after her dog on Tuesdays, and I’ve told the Humane Society that I won’t be there every other Saturday anymore, and yesterday I called the afterschool program at the elementary school and told them I couldn’t be a mentor any longer. Maybe I’m stopping all these things too soon, but I just want to have a clean break when it’s time for me to leave. Is that selfish of me, Mr. Whitherby?”
No, that’s human of you, Dair thought to himself. Didn’t she see that she couldn’t just take care of everyone else all the time? Didn’t she know that eventually everyone else would drain every little drop from her without ever wondering if Sarah was being taken care of? There was no doubt that Serenity’s Aunt Darla and Uncle Wayne loved her, and would do anything for her, but they couldn’t meet all of her needs. They couldn’t fill every void inside of her.
If Dair was honest with himself, he would admit that he wanted her with a passion he had never felt before. As the ocean’s tide was drawn to the bank and helpless to deny the pull of the moon’s call, so he was drawn to her. The human female had no idea he even existed, and yet he longed for her to see him, know him, and want him as he wanted her.
In that moment, as she stared at her cat and her weary eyes filled with tears, Dair realized that he wanted to be the one to meet those needs. He wanted to be the one to take care of her when she refused to take care of herself. But though she fascinated him, this Sarah Serenity Tillman, he had a job to do. And this fascination was one that he could not afford. It didn’t matter that his feelings had grown beyond her being an assignment for the Sandman. She was human; he was something more than human. His kind were never to mix with the Creator’s children, and yet Brudair could not deny his need to see her, be with her, and know more and more about her.
When she finally drifted off to sleep hours later, she wasn’t aware of his presence. Instead she was lost in her dreams―dreams that he helped create. That was what he did. He was the Sandman, after all, and dreams were his specialty. His name, Brudair, was Scottish Gaelic that literally meant dream, though the messengers of the Creator often simply called him Dair. Humans had heard of him, of course, but they thought of him as a myth, like the tooth fairy. They even had stories about him and his job as the Sandman but they were way, way off. Oh, he did give dreams but not to everyone and not only to children as the human myth implied. No, his job was much more important than just making sure that children had pleasant dreams.
The Sandman’s job was to go to the people designated to him by the Creator and influence their dreams for the Creator’s plan. These people were not just everyday Joes. The people on the list were people who would influence the course of history, usually in some major way. They would save a life, lead a country, start or end a war, or perhaps find the cure to a deadly illness. They were game changers and it was Dair’s job to help influence them to move in the direction the Creator wanted them to go. His dreams did not guarantee that the humans would follow because they had free will. They were able to make their own decisions about the direction of their lives. He could no more force them to do as his dreams suggest than he could turn himself into a human. There were times in his long existence that he wished he could just tell the humans he visited why they must go a certain direction in their lives, but that was not his place. And he didn’t always know the full plan of the Creator.
So, since the beginning of time, he, the Sandman, aka Brudair, had been casting dreams. His life was one of solitude, his only interactions being with the messengers of the Creator and inside the minds of the humans he visited. He had never been bothered by this existence―had never questioned the Creator’s design