11.23.08
Reptiles – a dream
I smiled at the little boy, looked up at the parents. Dad with his old-fashioned black slicker hair and Mummy with her round, equally shiny pile of curls. They smiled back, hands squeezing the boy’s shoulders simultaneously. The boy tried a grin – what would have passed for one in days long past had faded into a sickly grimace in his white face. “he hasn’t been well” and “things will improve with time” and other niceties passed back and forth. They were reluctant to leave him with me.
There wasn’t much of a choice, some performance they simply had to see and I was the last resort, the lesser of the many evils. So I came, they passed the boy to me with the “if anything happens” glare. It cupped my heart in razor fingers. I nodded, patted the boy’s back and sent him to his room. Daddy locked the bedroom door. “He wanders in his sleep.” I thought I heard small fists banging but they led me down the stairs to show me the amenities. TV, Fridge, Phone. Those razor fingers pressed on my heart. I nodded. They had to go now, they’d be late. They left. I released him from the dark sad room where he was captive.
Later he was asleep, and I heard them talking outside the door. I peered through the peephole at them. They were arguing about the boy. About “what would become of him” and other issues. I became invisible, hid in the bathroom while they entered as if they’d forgotten about me. There was a sound.
They’d shed this human face, talking with their lizard tongues from a half-body. I could not move. Legs, yes, human legs, and a human waist, and then this open fish head, this huge open, gaping fish mouth and from it a soft pink face and long scaled arms came. The boy, they would eat him tonight. He was ready. I raced up the stairs, opened his door and pulled him from his bed.
Enter the chase. The running to the car. The gas stations, the fast food, the diners, the strangers, the endless running. The boy becoming paler still, white and thin as paper.
One day he was choosing chips, salt and vingar, sour cream and onion… and I saw it on his neck. Three long red lines, wide open. Was he hurt? No, they didn’t hurt, he said. His voice had changed. His mouth moved but the sound was coming from somewhere else. He smiled weakly. I stared, turned him around again and again. Where was it coming from?? Finally I touched the long red sores, these gashes in his neck. Air pushed out towards me. Gills? I turned him around again, stared into his eyes. His mouth seemed to gape, not shape. He was changing into one of them.
Now desperate, hurry, find a cure, find a way to stop this from happening. Keep him from the evil that wanted to devour him – it was futile, a fight against the mob. They found us at the portapotties, his little face torn and peeling, hidden under a cap and hoodie. They grabbed him from me in the night when I could do nothing, no one but me could see what they were. I struggled, I fought, but his hat and hair came off in my hand.
They surrounded him. They pulled his skin, they peeled him like a banana. They ate it. They licked him. They fed him some premasticated globs, a cuddle and caress, sloppy pink floppy kisses and scaly head-rubs. They loved him. If he had a face anymore, he would have been smiling a grin like in days long past. His illness was over.
03.04.06
The Underground Kitchen
I dreamed we were purchasing bill pasnak’s apartment (before he was nawab). It was on two levels, had a raised living room, or maybe it was a sunken kitchen. This apartment was underneath a conservatory that has been in my dreams before. the kitchen had a little passthrough to give food and stuff to the living room, but the passthrough and counter was at the same level as the living room floor. it had a good-sized table in the kitchen, but the table was covered in carpet as an extension of the living room floor. in the kitchen above the sink – high above the sink – was a window at ground level, opening to the conservatory jungle above. This window had herbs growing in little jars up there.
i climbed up the counter to see the herbs, what was there. but there was also a collection of envelopes small square manila envelopes, labelled oddly. I picked one up, and on the back my full name was written in grandma-style script as if to decode the strange numbers on the front. I opened the envelope, and inside were photographs.
photographs of my life – or rather of my past within the dream identity. Each photo was about the size of a slide, small and square and hard. And when I looked at it, it was like going inside a little television, and all the action started moving. There was me, around 12 years old, wearing a skimpy blue sequinned get-up and too much makeup, sparkles on my cheeks, doing a 1950’s tap-dance routine with a similarly dressed girl in red. And me, even younger, dressed up as a branch of a christmas tree with silver and gold baubles hanging off my arms, singing. And in my teens doing dramatic small theatre, cat on a hot tin roof and all that. Gritty and teary-eyed acting. I had been some kind of performer as a kid, and bill had kept all these pictures. My husband looked at the pictures and said ‘i didn’t know you did all that’ … neither did i.
02.22.06
The Ingalls’ Escape
The scene begins with a wide open shot of the little chuck wagon driving across wide, flat prairie. There’s Pa and Ma up front and in back are myself and the two older daughters. Also riding with us is an older brother, on his own horse. And we are in a hurry. He holds a rifle and keeps looking behind. We are running away. We’d never intended to go out and settle the great wide america. But now, with Them after us, we must start a new life. New names, new hopes, new dreams, and a new world. (at this point in the dream I was like “wow, I didn’t know any of this!)
The sound of hoofs on dirt come behind us and Pa shouts “Hyahh” at the horses and we race away. Our brother stays behind and shoots at them. I watch from the back of the chuck wagon as they shoot him and his horse down. We clutch each other and cry for him. We have to get to the next town, where we can disappear.
They chase high-speed, and our wagon wheel comes off, we fall to the ground and must run for our lives. We promise to meet again, and separate into the town.
I hide in the doorway of a chinese restaurant. The 12 year old son of the owners tells me I can hide there if I do his chores for him: knit a new curtain for the doorway and hang it using a fancy two-part locking curtain rod. I sit and knit there for days, hiding. He brings me congee and talks to me, and are secret friends. I wonder what has happened to my family. One day I peer through the window and see the army marching by. HOWEVER it is more like the prussian army, with spiky helmets and pre-nazi paraphernalia. And there is my brother, marching with them. He has become one of them. I am shattered. I must finish the damn curtain and hang it up before he betrays my family’s secret hiding places. So, I desperately bind off the curtain and try to figure out this stupid two-part hanger rod, which has to lock together in a certain way to make it stay stuck. I finally get it locked into place and start to sneak away, aware the army is just on the other side of the small garden wall. Just as I am sneaking, the curtain rod unlocks and breaks in half with the loudest sound ever. The chinese mother starts shouting about an intruder and the army changes course. I RUN.
Cut to Pa carrying Laura on his back along the side of a river, careful not to misstep and slip on the rocks. Ma and Mary are hiding somewhere else – he hopes – and he so carefully walks along the river rocks with laura’s little arms tight around his neck. Suddenly he and Laura are surrounded by soldiers and captured.
I hear of their capture and try to find out where they are being kept. The jail is run by a korean family and is on the other, darker side of town. I go there and find my whole family behind black bars in this small room. They are guarded by a single, sullen, teenage girl. She is excited to talk to someone other than a prisoner, and invites me to sit with her. She is angry with her mother for reading her diary and wants to get back at her. Her mother brings us tea and cakes, which we eat, and the girl tells me how she hates working in the family business and just wants to do her own thing. I tell her I’ll help her, trade her a black cloak for the key to the jail. She can use the cloak to run away, do her own thing, with no one knowing who she is. She frees my family.
The ingalls family runs away, down a brick stairwell, to disappear into the night.
Torture in the Swamplands
i was on an mi5 team in the bayou or mississipi country swamplands. we had a witness we were interrogating- he was terrified- it was really intense and it was my first mission. i was afraid of what would happen. I didn’t want to hurt him. there was a body floating in the swamp, all blue and green and swampgrassed. then another body splashed in there. we had accidentally killed our witness and now we let him go to be eaten by alligators. i did not feel good about this, but i had to stick with my team. there was a neon flashing sign for a greasy spoon restaurant. the back of which was our safehouse. in front people were eating, unaware this guy was being tortured in the back.
