affectionate reptile

we’re spending some time at a friends house and we have spent the night in the upstairs bedroom and also under the basement stairs (?) Both nights, we are bothered by this snake. It keeps coming to us when we get in bed and getting right next to me. I think it  bit me once when I tried to fling it away but mostly it would coil around my wrist and slide up my sleeve into my shirt. Wrapped around my torso, it made it impossible to sleep so I kept trying to get rid of it, even though it didn’t seem to have any harm in mind. I finally got so frustrated by the persistence that I squshed his little head between my thumb and forefinger, then I felt guilty that I killed it.

exorcism

i had a dream last night, I was at this huge old house with a bunch of people. It was haunted I guess, because the ghost of a little boy kept pestering me, and biting me. I told him he better learn to be a nice little ghost because I could perform an exorcism and send him straight to hell for an eternity of pain. He left me alone after that.

c.2007

i am a speck

Around the corner, a sun beam comes through the hole in the roof and hits me square in the face. I am as illuminated as I feel now. I am a mote of dust, floating through a golden ray streaking across your living room at noon. I am a far off star, a high and lazy god. A dream, tearing its way into this reality through the tiniest rip, begins to color everything with its absurdity.

hiking

We went hiking up there in the mountains and everything was amazingly beautiful. The dirt is so glittery it looks like faeries dance there. We saw this one tree that had a big weird scar. If you looked at it right it looked like a guy’s head, but one of the eyes was hanging out on the cheek. We lost our shit, temporarily. The universe is making fun of us.

a poem: 

I used to come to this diner with you

You liked the fries

and getting larger I could see lies

past your face, inside

Clever of you

to hold so still

but Im not completely daft,

and I know you

You sat without moving

for so many days,

my inertia made me ill

I watched, disgusted

as you slid into a crevice

between the bed and the wall

but you were anchored to me,

so you came out

as soon as I left

(7-4-06)

thousands of spiders hanging from stars

I dreamed that there were thousands of spiders hanging from the sky.

I took a picture of them with my camera phone. When I went to show it to my friends, I noticed that there was a new voice mail. At this point, I noticed that I felt really strange, and I dropped my phone when I tried to open it. As I bent over to pick it up, everything slowed down, the sound of the phone hitting the deck echoed over and over and over.

I lost my balance and fell ever so slowly on the deck. Everything went black. I could feel my self turning over and hear the echo …ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch… but I couldn’t see anything.

I thought to my self, I think I’m having a seizure… and I tried to stand up but I woke up instead.

c.2006

my second night, ever, in missouri

I was having trouble sleeping at night on the trip. Probably due to the fact that I slept all day long in the car. I had a strange dream (or dreams) the first night we camped in Missouri, the day before my campus visit.

I am at a large complex in a thickly wooded area with many large rocks and caves. I get the impression it’s a school. There is a doctors office and dentist’s office which are located on the top floors of buildings situated in a gully, as to be accessed by bridges from the path. My tooth is cracked and falling out. It’s still a little attached to the gum, but I pull it out anyway and it only hurts for a second.

I wake up, relieved to find my teeth intact. The left side of my head hurts. I sleep.

I am back at the same place, it’s gotten dark. My tooth is falling out again, this time I’m stumbling up the path toward the dentist. I drop my tooth which is in many pieces on the ground and stop to pick it up. There’s shards of glass in my mouth too, sticking to my gums and tongue. I don’t remember any blood, but it hurts. Now, there’s gunk on the newly exposed parts of my teeth, it’s gritty and comes off easily. I talk to someone briefly at this point, I don’t remember the face.

I wake up again. My head hurts horribly. I drink water, eat a nutrigrain bar, take a shower, and go back to lie down, 45 minutes or so after getting up.

I’m at the same place. B. is there with me now, we’re trying to get lost in the caves. We find some kind of dead animal (sheep or goat) and take a piece of it’s intestine. We are trying to be alone but his mother showed up (played by the high school nurse, Mrs. Colquitt) and we leave. The way out is confusing and we get separated. I make my way out of the caves and see that the area is full of tourists now. They are being loud and rowdy, letting off fireworks. I start to jog back toward the school. There’s a man behind me (who has the face of M.’s roommate, who I meet two days later at the wedding, but hadn’t met yet, he’s called “papa goat”) and I challenge him to a race. I win because I’m half floating down the hill. I’m noticing my tooth is still missing. I get back to the school and go to a bathroom where I clean out the length of innards and check out the hole where my tooth was. I wrap up something to give to Brian, and realize I don’t have much time left (maybe I’ll wake up soon?) and so I leave and someone outside, maybe the man I raced, tells me Brian is at the dentist. I make my way back to the dentist’s office and go inside. The man in the waiting room has a friendly, light colored cat who runs up to greet me. B.’s mother is there working on a patient and she tells me he’s in another exam room. I go find him and give him the piece of intestine and the small wrapped gift (which seems at this point in the dream like it might have been my tooth). I tell him I’m leaving, he seems sad. I hug him.

I wake up, head still pounding.

c.2006

for my mother

I am driving on the east side toward Albany st. It is autumn. I am talking with S. about some people we know. Nothing major or important. He is kind of directing me somewhere, he wants to show me something. We are passing the cemetery. Yeah, that cemetery. He just says, “pull over” and I do. I sorta have this feeling in my stomach, like, sacrilege. I shouldn’t come here with him like this, especially not at night. It makes us both feel weird, but he wants to show me something so we get out of the car.

Just then, my parents come by. “See,” I say, “told you we shouldn’t come here.” They pull over. My mom gets out of the car. She is obviously very well pissed off. She is acting like I’m doing something wrong, “what’s he showing you, Heather?” I ask her how she knows that. She tells me it doesn’t matter how she knows. She has bugged my car or something. Now I’m starting to get angry too. We’re yelling at each other.

Back at the house, my parent’s are unloading the books from my trunk. They think I’m moving back in. I’m thinking about selling everything I own, buying a bus ticket and just disappearing one day.

I wake up, still angry. Still thinking about selling my things. Fucking bitch. I nod off.

Back at the cemetery. Now it’s mom who wants to show me something. Part of me hopes it’s her own grave. It is a grave, one with a large hooked piece of rusty metal coming out of the ground. I don’t see this as a big deal, not at all interesting. Then she tells me that the other end of the rod is in the head of the corpse, and that it is suffering. We are both horrified so we walk away.

Up the hill, we turn, and look back. She is still spooked, and she sees something that isn’t there at all. I know she’s hallucinating, but I can see it too. She starts to run away but trips. Or maybe I push her. She starts to fall. She tumbles down the hill toward the grave with the rod protruding from the ground. She hits the rod, uprooting it. On the other end she sees the grotesquely rotted head. She is franticly thrashing, in utter horror. I run to her, over crushing leaves. I kneel, cradle her head in my lap. I try to call her back to reality, “mommy! mommy!” She looks at me, but she doesn’t see me at all. “It’s not real,” I plead with her, but I see it too, so it’s hard to convince her.

c.2001

cold autumn morning

I was suddenly aware that I was lying down, looking into the blue eyes of a boy. These eyes were wrapped in long lashes, accented by coarse blond curls, and punctuated by a wide, fat-lipped smile. “Breakfast?” His hand was on my stomach, had presumably been there for hours. I had, after all, stayed the night. I got up and used the bathroom, having no door (like the rest of the rooms) but only a curtain. I could hear him talking to the girl in the kitchen, his girlfriend, who was making breakfast for us. He had painted the bathroom (like all the other rooms) a garish pastel color. Back in the kitchen, the very thin, attractive girl with short dark hair, asked me if I preferred sausage or bacon. I said sausage. She cooked for us like it was her job, attentively checking the biscuits in the oven. The boy came back and I watched them interact. They have known each other for years. They argue like they’re married. Which they are. I find this a little disconcerting.

We sat on the floor of the room painted pastel green to eat breakfast. The boy was sitting between me and his wife, with his right leg extended behind me. I have realized that my host is wearing womens lingerie, which is extremely flattering but I managed to keep my mouth shut.The wife wandered around in her underwear for a while, trying to find something to wear amid the mess, I can only assume. We chatted and nonchalantly joked about me screwing her husband, which I had not, but probably wouldn’t have minded. Then she asked me to trim up her hair, which I did, and then thanked her for breakfast before saying goodbye. She was late for a class or practice or something.

So alone, the boy and I decided not to spend the day in the atrociously messy apartment, and made our way downstairs to my car. We drove to the cemetery, which I don’t believe I had ever been to during the day. We walked all over the crunchy leaves, making as much noise as possible. We talked about art and sex and family. But mostly we talked about his wife, to whom he refers, semi-affectionately, as “the whore.” And the day wore on. At times we would find a grassy spot and sit in the sun to warm ourselves. It made it easier to kiss when our jaws weren’t chattering. I just couldn’t figure out what was happening, or if it was happening at all. I asked him if I was dreaming. He looked at me, changed his posture as if to express his longing, and told me he didn’t think so.

c.2001

sara plays the farmer’s daughter

I find my self in a horse stable. There are two sisters there, moving a coffin outside. Their mother, I have learned, is in the plain pine box. The eldest sister, Marie, seems irritated at my presence while the younger, Sara, is happy to have me as her guest. Unfortunately, the entire family shares the thinly veiled sentiment of Marie. Sara and I spend days talking about the farm and everything that goes on there. She takes me to the small cemetery behind the barn and tells me about all the animals who were more than just livestock, and how each of them died. Yet she avoids talking about her own mother’s death. I assume it is still too painful a subject and let it drop. Sara is endearing and beguiling and invites me to her bed on more than one occasion.

One night I am making my way from Sara’s room to the bathroom down the long hall in the farmhouse. I pass an open door with a light on inside. Seeing Sara sitting there, I push the door open. Both the sisters are there, discussing something quietly with their father and aunt. The conversation stops immediately when the rest of the house notices me. I get harsh glares from the room. I tell them all that they have made me uncomfortable, which is an inconsiderate thing to do to a trustworthy guest. Sara follows me into the hall when I leave and catches me by the wrist. She tells me that though she’s grown quite fond of me, it would be best if I were to leave and never return. “Is this about your mother?” I ask. Her eyes widen, she whips her head around to look at the open door behind her. Her hand flies to my mouth. She says nothing but “go.”

c.2001

made to be broken

I was hanging out at this crack house a while back. A friend of a friend’s house really. We were in the kitchen. The host, J., was talking about his keg party the week prior (which I missed). I call it a crack house because there was always something going down there, something I didn’t really want to be involved in, involving – who even knows what… I hang out on occasion because J. is generous and is a great storyteller, and has never ever made a pass at me. On this particular night, there were some college boys in the living room talking to Z. God knows what they were up to in there.

Anyway, in through the back door fumbles J.’s little sister, whom he just calls bug. She rushed straight for me, out of breath, with the most desperate look on her face. Since I was the only one facing the door, nobody else saw what she had in her hand. She bent down in front of me, quickly, and picked up my hand with one of hers. She placed in my palm a small, smooth object. She swallowed, staring straight into my eyes and never blinked once, then disappeared out the back door as fast as she had appeared.

Now, J. had stopped what he was saying and was awkwardly swiveled around in his chair, craning his neck to see where she was going. “What’s up her ass?” he murmured. “I dunno,” I replied, figuring what she had handed to me was my business if no one else saw. “It’s getting late, I need to sleep,” I said. I declared some goodbyes to the guys I was chatting with, polished off my Corona and left.

Walking my self home was no easy task. I wanted desperately to look at the object the little girl with panicked eyes had trusted me with. There wasn’t enough light to see by anyway. I decided to stop when I was in the park, which was always the safest leg of the trip. Under the light of one of the yellow lamps on the east edge of the park, I stopped. I pulled out the thing, almost dying of anticipation.

It was an egg. Well, not just an egg. Like a Fabergé egg, only made from a real egg. It seemed empty, except for a shifting weight, but had no holes whatsoever. It was more delicate than I had assumed. The shell was carved with designs unlike any I had ever seen. Seemingly perfect geometric patterns, accented in gold. But it didn’t actually look like paint; it seemed to be part of the surface. The thing as a whole was indescribable. And I imagined there was none other in the entire world. What could this be? Why was I trusted with such a treasure? And, what could be inside?

The yellow light of the lamp shone on my whole world. The rest of the park had practically disappeared. All that existed was this egg, and my self. I was enraptured. What was in side? I must know. It was beyond my very imagination. Without thinking and before I could reason I had bent down and slammed the egg onto the pavement. It crushed effortlessly under the weight of my palm.

As I lifted my hand, all the particles of the egg and everything inside was already beginning to slide away. All of the matter, shell and contents seemed to turn to liquid. It was something like mercury but more yellow, like a golden color and it glistened like diamonds. The cracks in the sidewalk ate it up. And before I knew it, all of the egg was gone.

I woke, startled at the suddenness of it. I wondered how I had made it the rest of the way home. It took me a few minutes to realize that the bizarre occurrences of the prior evening had been a dream. Yes, I remembered finishing my paper, showering and going to bed. I didn’t know any one named J., and I didn’t live on the edge of a park, and I never walked anywhere, especially not in the middle of the night. Not that the realism of the dream had faded, just that the morning sun made it seem like a memory from another life.

I got up and combed my hair. I walked out into the blazing sun. I had wanted to go to the library, but I felt that a cup of coffee might just shift reality back into place. I got in my car and drove to the nearest diner. I ordered coffee and breakfast. I sat and waited, sipping my coffee, thinking about the book I was reading. The waitress returned with my plate.

But now it isn’t the same waitress. And the soft-boiled egg in the cup doesn’t look edible to me at all. Hypnotic and beautiful but certainly not edible. The same girl from my dream, (this morning wearing a uniform but looking no less desperate) says, “be careful.”
I say, “Excuse me?”
“It’s hot,” is her reply.
I put my breakfast in my jacket pocket, pay and leave.

c.2001