I was sitting on a stool in a kitchen. My grandmother was also there, stroking me on the back and brushing my hair. She was trying to calm me because I couldn’t remember anything and couldn’t speak because my brain was dead. I had no idea what I needed to say, except that it was important.
My grandmother was translating my thoughts for me to the other two women in the room—but her story had nothing to do with me. It was something about a lady in beautiful clothes, riding in a blue carriage. As she described the silk and boning in the lady’s corset, I could feel my ribs getting tighter and tighter. Then I was looking down into myself—a cinched-in exoskeleton with nothing inside.
The chronology gets confused here. I remember being in the house before entering it. It felt as though it were turned inside-out, much in the same way that my body felt like a hollow thing I could look down into. I was a presence in the walls of the house, and I was heavy and stony; resistant.
On the outside, I was with two men, and we were going to sneak into this house and kidnap the children because it was going to be bombed. One of the men was wearing a long midnight blue sweater with a heart-shaped pocket on the chest—sounds silly, but in my dream it was like chain-mail, a very somber sweater.
The door was huge and heavy, and there were wooden lions in the entryway. Upstairs, the bedrooms were chained shut. We found a young friend of mine there with small hands to pick the locks. Inside the rooms, people were asleep on the beds, but also half-dead. They had been lined up and stacked by someone other than themselves.
Gene (the friend, who was also me) picked up a woman in a lacy nightgown and cradled her, carrying her out. Everyone started to stir, and this huge fat woman came in and dragged a few of them out into the hallway. She said: “We have visitors, so we’d better iron their sheets.”
They started ironing the sheets, and spraying them with air-fresheners because they were moldy. Dust and air-freshener were choking me. I grabbed the can of freshener and ran into the bathroom. I realized the building was crumbling, and that’s where the dust was coming from. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Through a hole in the ceiling, I saw my godfather, and Gene’s parents, and an old teacher of mine in the room above. They had a secret club that I wanted to be a part of. They were all eating cookies, laughing, and whispering. Then they started diving from the upstairs room into the bathtub of my room. So I crawled out the window, and I could smell ashes as I scaled down the side of the building.
I was suddenly out on the beach, which lay close to my grandmother’s house. I was sad because I hadn’t been to the beach in so long, and was too frightened to go in the water. The waves were alive, enormous and green. They knew I’d neglected them, and they’d kill me if I went in.
I ran along the sand, up by some shacks. I came upon this luminous white antler the size of a car, half-buried in the sand. I started dragging it down the beach until I ran into my mother. She said I had to return the antler: the shack-dwellers were all poor artists, and the antler was their main inspiration. I opened my mouth to speak, but instead I inhaled sand, which filled me from my feet to my chest as though I were a vase.
Retreating into the bushes, I crouched down, pulling up carrots. I thought I could cook something to make everyone happy. Then I was inside the steamy kitchen of an Indian restaurant. The carrots were incredible—I somehow seasoned them with bergamot (as in Earl Grey tea) and fried them into chips. They were light as air and hot and crispy—they had carroty earthiness, combined with the wild, indescribable smell and flavor of bergamot. I ate a few, and sent the plate up aboveground with the ding of a bell.
[submitted by Emma]
