I dreamt of snow in August. A beautiful foam, white snow covering the cars and I brushed it off the gifts I was bringing to a friend: ice packs; thawing shrimp, scallops; Sponge Bob Square Pants band-aids and cleaning supplies. She wasn’t home, so I hung out in her house for a long time – and then rethought my gift and wondered what she would assume when she saw the cleaning supplies and so that worried me and I went into her car (the gift was a surprise in her car in a few red coolers) and I took the cleaning supplies out and decided that I would tell her I was making her dinner.
My mom was there visiting. In the snow. I was sad summer was over because it meant it would be another long winter. My friend’s house was warmer than mine and that’s why I decided to say over for so long waiting for her.
Later, I suppose when the snow melted off, my mom brother and I were on a trip in our old white VW van. We needed to turn around and my mom found a lake, the shore dotted with homes, and she drove out over the water, making wide wide turns and said “This is the perfect place to turn around.”
And suddenly it was my job to collect a little girl who was playing with her friends. Small children sitting in a circle betting or playing with small plastic toys. The little girl lied and said she had to talk to someone and when I saw her next she was sitting in the circle with the other children. I told her we had to go and she ignored me. I told her we had to go and she looked up at me patronizingly and pulled a small pink toy out of her mouth and placed it on the ground. I yelled at her to get up and she did. We were taking her to her other family, to her father’s house, I think, with a terrified, skittish, abused white Chihuahua sitting on my lap and a mother (who was not my mother) she was terrified of. The girl and the Chihuahua.
I woke up to my cat meowing from the roof. All the screens on the windows, all the doors closed, I’m still trying to figure out how she managed to get outside – and onto the roof. I rescued her and she came in preening and obviously proud of herself, flopping down on the floor like a queen having escaped from her castle for a night out.
Spay and neuter your pets, people.
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