I never want to go to Thailand

The minivan pulled up to a roundabout outside the resort and my family piled out - there were 10 of us, a rag tag assortment of cousins and aunts and uncles, plus me and my sister.  My parents were already here somewhere, having taken a flight to Pukhet earlier in the week.

A team of bellboys stood in a line.  As each one was introduced, he would run to the back of the van and add a suitcase to the growing collection on the baggage cart. I wondered if we were supposed to tip them, and how much.  I wasn't prepared, having failed to exchange currency at the airport, and it stressed me out to be waited on, by an army no less.

I glanced over at my sister, Alison, lounging at the back of the group, in a plaid red minidress, sandals, hair long and sleek down her back.  She'd been to Thailand half a dozen times, as well as numerous places in Mexico, South America, eastern Europe, western Europe, Australia, Japan.  At this point I believed the only continents she'd failed to at least set foot on were Africa and Greenland.

Ali tended to travel by learning the language and arriving with only a loose itinerary.  I imagined her moving through a country like a ninja, engaging on the fly in complex negotiations for out of the way accomodations.

The rest of the family swirled around me, in tourist shorts and walking shoes, looking rumpled and sweaty and definitely not capable of conversing in the local language.

We were instructed to board a small electric shuttle which took us literally half a block, then we were herded onto a smooth wooden platform, that began whisking us down a canyon.  It began like a mobile sidewalk at the airport but as we picked up speed the surface came apart in discrete squares.  My sister and I were at the front of the group so we ended up alone on the first section, with just the baggage cart, separated from the rest of the family.

It all happened so fast that I barely had time to register that there were no safety rails and no discernible steering or brakes.  The canyon got deeper, the drop off the side more formidable. 

We slid smoothly to a stop and waited, suspended over train tracks.  About a hundred yards to the left, children splashed in a giant rock water pool, their squeals echoing faintly off the canyon walls.  Another hundred yards ahead the canyon dead-ended and the tracks led to the wide loading dock of an immense complex.

My sister was at the very front edge of the platform, when it suddenly lurched forward.  She stumbled and I had only enough time to begin the "what if, oh shit" thought before she was off the side, the platform sliding past her body, hundreds of feet below, lying unnaturally arranged and still.  The red dress framed her like a mannequin.

I screamed, "stop," but the platform sped ahead to the loading dock without unloading, then continued briskly through gleaming white corridors, like a gurney ride, and I was crying now, hyperventilating, would have been screaming but couldn't catch enough air, huge hysterical sobs, in that cartoonish way all movie moms receive the news of their son's death at war, and I felt simultaneously like my chest had been crushed, and I was drowning and it hurt so much, just kept getting worse, my mind racing through flashes of the stumbling, her body on the ground, did I try to reach out as she fell, what if I just reached out now, could I still save her

I woke, heart hammering, breathing hard, the light on,  I am in bed.  I'm in bed.  It's 4am.  It was a dream.  Take a breath.  Just a dream.

Political scandal

The familiar chime of the eleven o clock news.  "Good evening."  Like the half dozen solo drinkers, I looked up to see the the vaguely familiar face of a woman with shoulder length brown hair fill the flat screen hanging over the bartender station.  "Grace Hailey, of CBN, filling in for Tom Donovan."  It was a slow night at Joe's Tavern.  Light conversation continued around us, from those lucky enough to have drinking companions.

"Tonight, a disturbing turn in a story we've been following since early this morning.  The two ice chests abandoned at around 6AM on the baggage claim at O'Hare airport, originally believed to contain explosives thanks to an anonymous phone call made to Chicago police, have now been confirmed to contain the remains of a woman."

Almost everyone was looking up now; conversation died.  I took a long pull of my beer.  "Authorities claim they have been able to identify the body, using genetic testing and dental records, but will not release her name until her next of kin have been notified." 

The head shot of a high-cheekboned blonde with icy blue eyes slid across the screen.  "This news comes only two days after the highly publicized disappearance of former Miss American contestant Claire Porter, a long-time resident of Chicago's upper west side and half-sister to the President, and follows on allegations last week that the two were romantically involved while the President was still married to his first wife Marie.  The White House had no comment and police refused to say if the two cases were linked."

Hover cars and Faberge eggs

Last night I did something radical - I slept without my phone.  It may be causal or merely coincidental but my dreams were exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to fill a void left by an iPhone.

Early in the night I drove a hover vehicle.  I'm inclined to call it a hover car but for full disclosure must mention that it lacked almost every single distinguishing feature of a car - there was no combustion engine, steering wheel, gears, brakes; in fact there were no discernible moving parts unless you count the big black stick in the front that ostensibly acted like a rudder.  To be honest it most resembled a plywood box, something barely upscale from Calvin and Hobbes.

I rode it proudly, dipping and swerving over the urban landscape as if it was entirely normal to move about the country in a box operated only by a stick and the power of my mind.  I maneuvered through a giant outdoor market, a place I knew well, stopping to talk to friends, acquaintances and even attempted - unsuccessfully but without drama - to pick up a cute new girl on my way.

I also tried to take the hover car (because I refuse to call it a hover box and vehicle is too pompous) to the beach but kept running into residential neighbourhoods and powerlines which is entirely too much of a recently-returned-from-Hawaiian-vacation metaphor to be quite comfortable.

Next up!  I was a 20-something ne'er-do-well, engaged to a wealthy debutante, at an extrememly uncomfortable dinner where I was being introduced to as well as subtly and thoroughly despised by her parents.

Briefly we had a Freaky Friday / Sixth Sense gender moment, and I was walking across the dining room in a ridiculous gown covered with bristly fake lilies, enduring the cold entitled stares of the snooty family who clearly thought I shouldn't have come to the wake for their son.

A moment later I resumed my initial gender and socioeconomic status and my place among the living so that I could Tango with my bride-to-be at our engagement party.

As had been our plan all along, we officially broke off our engagement mid-song, which also happened to be halfway up the staircase, next to the extensive collection of Faberge eggs, much to the relief and delight of her family. 

However the dance was so moving that some of her relatives relented in their distaste and sat around me at my Consolement party later that day to listen to my thoroughly insincere tearful explanation of our parting.

The reason for the staged engagement and breakup was never revealed and my pretend-fiance and I remained good friends. 

Extinction dream

The giant arc shuddered and swerved.  Eighteen storeys of passengers clung to their seats, the adults unnaturally quiet, only the children screaming or crying.  We hit something.  A sandbar.  The ship tilted like a skyscraper going down and then magically righted itself and was still.

We'd had 72 hours of calm sailing, and now the artificial normalcy of travel  - the routine of meals and naps, of toilet lines, and pacing the perimeter of the sealed decks - was suddenly gone.  I sat, still in my safety belt, grieving.  All the people not on the ship.  My family.  My friends.  My lovers. 

Within minutes it was clear that other ships had grounded nearby.  A lot of other ships.  A few of the able-bodied and single were sent out to recon.  Stepping from the cool gun metal interior, blinking on the sand, in the sun, we entered a war zone.  Adults running, children lost and crying, men on motorcycles or on foot pointing guns and yelling.  We had traveled on an aircraft carrier, retrofitted hastily for civilian transport, so the few entrances were well armored, but many small yachts were being looted and destroyed. 

Bullets.  Someone was firing.  More than one someone.  My small group dove for cover in all different directions and I was pushed hundreds of yards down the beach, separated from the strangers who were my newest family, separated from the safety of the battleship. 

I ran blindly for minutes then crouched in the shelter of a long sleek grey vessel.  A hatch opened and I was pulled into sudden quiet.  Fluorescent white bounced off gleaming surfaces.  A long stretching hallway branched into nooks of equipment and computers that could have been anywhere in Research America.

Only five other beings occupied this enormous space - a husband and wife who studied oceanography, a technician, the captain, the couple's eight-year-old son, and I wondered first why I had failed to leverage my research connections into this bomb shelter luxury and then why I had been chosen, from the masses outside, to be saved, if I somehow still gave off a scientist vibe detectable only to others of my kind.  Most likely it was this: a woman alone, still clean and nourished. 

I longed to stay but the hermetic safety felt like a trap.  They had food for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then what.  The world outside would still be in shambles, probably worse, and I had a panicky instinct that if I was going to survive I had to face that reality.   I accepted a snack, some water, then left, heading back to the ship, using shadows and the intermittent withered shrubs for cover.

Puppy love

I was on vacation in a department store called Woolco.  In the hardware section I found several puppies for sale.  The owners sat bent up inside the tiny cages offering their puppies through the open door to passers-by to try out.

I cuddled with a tiny tortoiseshell puppy; it had a miniature husky face and soft triangular ears.  After returning the puppy to its owner-cage I resumed shopping.  But I could not get the puppy out of my head.  I stalked the hardware aisle twice more, trying to resemble someone innocently shopping for light bulbs or screw drivers.  My heart soared every time I was able to verify that my puppy was still there.

After shopping I was due at a barbecue .  Inevitably I turned every conversation into a story about the puppy.  The puppy was so cute.  The puppy's fur was soft.  Did they want to see a creeper snapshot I'd stolen of the puppy when the owner wasn't looking?

Finally two of my friends insisted that I either shut up or show them the puppy.  We drove to the store.  I wasn't sure which floor I had been on when I first found the puppies; I scoured the first floor with no luck so we went up a flight of stairs.  We walked every puppy-less aisle, then returned to the stairs.  They were dotted with orange traffic cones so we had to swing and hop our way back down to the first floor.  No success; swing hop back to the second floor.  Search for puppies.  Still nothing.

I started to panic.  I couldn't find the puppies.  Finally I found two hardware displays that had flanked the puppy cages.  All sign of the puppies were gone.  I burst into tears.  My friends said I was foolish and that clearly this was a sign that I was not ready for a dog.

Shipping containers and med students

I park my van on a narrow gravel driveway next to Repurposes, a condo complex made of shipping containers.  My friend Craig comes out of the first house and waves me in.  "I'll make tea," he says, disappearing inside, while I wrangle my two cats out the side door of the van and in through his front door.

Craig starts the kettle and then opens the back door.  Both cats shoot through before I can say anything.

"They are indoor only," I begin, but Craig interrupts me, reassures me that his is a completely fenced yard.  He points through a small porthole to a skinny strip of grass with tall fences on both sides.  But the fence stops short of the ground and as we watch, both cats wriggle under it easily.

"Oh.  Sorry," says Craig.

I rush to open the back fence gate.  My fluffy orange cat is at the bottom of  a cliff; I have no idea where the other one is.  I call and he climbs towards my voice.  The cliff begins as a shallow slope at the bottom but the incline is negative by the top so that it is a mild overhang.  I have to close my eyes as the cat negotiates his way back; it's too nerve-wracking to watch.  I scoop him up at the top, heart pounding, eyes still shut, and shut the gate.  I stroke him and he feels sleek.  Opening my eyes I realize this is a short-haired black cat.

I leave Craig's.  It's darker now.  I've parked my van much farther away than I thought.  The neighbourhood seems much more urban.

I walk under a freeway underpass and a medical student in scrubs steps drunkenly from the passenger seat of a parked rusting car.  He's frantically emptying a hat onto the ground and somehow I know to hold my breath even before feces begin raining from it.  He takes a few steps then vomits copiously on the ground from the stench. 

I pass a sleeping bag with two bodies sleeping head to toe.  The bag is unzipped in the middle, so the heads at each end are covered but two mirror imaged white naked pelvises are exposed.  I wake exhausted, scared, and sad.

Househunting on the brain

I pull into the driveway of the farmhouse.  It is three stories tall and narrow, old, but recently painted - yellow with dark brown trim.  I use the realtor code that I shouldn't have to get in.

Inside, the air is musty though not in an unpleasant way.  I have recently watched a horror film.  It makes climbing the dark stairwells and opening the old creeky doors a mildly challenging experience.  But it is midday.  And I am 43 years old.  I brush off the ghosts with logic and keep going.

The sun is half-shielded by clouds.  In the white-walled kitchen, the winter light pours, bright and watery, through old but big single-paned windows, making everything seem simultaneously soft focus and overlit.

I expected the house to be cold and it is drafty in spots but surprisingly warm and cozy overall.   I am chilled from the bitter wind outside, don't even realize I am hunting for baseboards to turn on till I reach the living room, and walk through a jet of warm air; it's coming through a vent in the ceiling.

Imagine living again in a centrally heated house!  For a moment I daydream.  The house is in good condition - for its age.  On the lawn, I had stood on the gravel drive and reveled in the hush, the ground soft with calf-high wild grasses that stretch for acres in all directions.

But the floors tilt this way and that.  Walls would have to be knocked down.  Wiring, appliances, windows.  The farmhouse's antique charm is no match for the ancient adding machine ticking up in my head.  The dream dies before I have even started adding in the cost of refinishing the hardwoods.

On the top floor a long corridor emerges into an attic that bulges out over a barn sized garage.  I don't remember seeing this from the road, a puzzle since the road curved around the property for a quarter mile on the approach, showing it off from at least three angles.

Narrow, steep stairs.  As I descend, I hear car tires, someone talking.  My realtor, talking to someone on the phone?  No.  Two children's voices and a slightly deeper but still female voice.  In the gloom of the staircase I must have dislodged something because I hear "thump, thump" then raised voices all at once, the only discernable phrase from the jumble something like "oh my god, a severed head!"

I freeze then, five steps from the bottom.  I can see three sets of legs, not sure if they can see mine.  "Hello?" I call out, not wanting to show up unannounced.  I startle when I spot the trophy head of a deer, staring up at me from the floor where it must have rolled after thump-thumping off some wall. 

"Is someone there?"  The woman's voice.

"Hi, yes, I'm so sorry" I talk fast but take each remaining stair slowly, "I'm here looking at the house with my realtor.  We must have miscommunicated the timing somehow."

I emerge from the gloom of the stairwell into the garage.  The ceiling soars two stories above us, complete with old wooden rafters, and the requisite layers of cobwebs.  The mother seems mid-30s, short curly dark hair.  Her voice is steady as we introduce ourselves but the kids have become utterly still and silent.  They press into her, tight, making her into a human insect, six feet, one body.

"Sorry about the head," I blurt.  "I mean, I don't know how it got there but I was trying to be careful, and I really had no idea someone would be here..." I trail off, realizing I am not making myself seem any less crazy or dangerous.

She just smiles, takes a breath as if to say something and - "Mom look!"  Her son points to something shiny on the ground midway between us.  Things, plural, actually.   We all converge on the pile, bonded by curiosity.

The mom bends down.  "It's jewelry," she says.  "Uncle used to store it in all sorts of weird places.  I bet it fell out of that deer head when it rolled down the stairs."  She begins sorting the pile into bracelets, necklaces, rings.  "Look around," she instructs.  "There could be more."  I search nearby and bring back some earrings, coins, a small satin purse.

"Don't worry," she says glancing up at me, "I'll give you a cut."  I shake my head, uncomfortable, feeling more acutely than ever that I am an intruder, but she is already head down back at her task, and I find myself unable to speak.

Through the open barn door it is suddenly dark.  Light spills from the windows onto the gravel drive.  The woman and her children have disappeared, leaving only the pile of jewelry.  The "For Sale" sign sports a "SOLD" banner.  People mill inside and out, holding cups of cider, glasses of wine.  They chat and drink and the summer air is that comfortable perfect temperature that comes like an apology after a long, scorching day.

This isn't my housewarming party.  This isn't my house.  I don't have one, don't own even personal portable property, just a battered rucksack and this loot scavenged from the garage.  I straighten my ragged sweater, run my hands through my hair and stroll out to the table for the free snacks.

London blitz

I am watching some gianormous science talk in a huge hall with 300 colleagues and this girl about five crawls into my lab.

"Hi," she says. "I'm Rebecca."  Before I know it I've got this girl curled around my little grey cat who has also shown up entirely out of context, and the cat is purring and the girl is warm and sleepy and it's like I have Instant Family in my lap, just add water.

It's nice.  Nicer than I thought.  I feel the start of tears and try to focus on whatever the hell Generic Signaling Pathway, Statistially Significant Bar Graph, Clever Analogy, Neat Tie In To Medicine that had my attention before but it's impossible.  I'm already imagining christmases and birthdays, random walks to the park, firsts - first bike, first day of school, first serious conversation.

Then my cat leaves and I feel uncomfortable.  This child is a stranger and what if people wonder where I got her from?  For that matter, where DID she come from?  I shift the way I do when I want to get a snack and my cat is seated on my lap.  And this girl reacts just the same way, sliding effortlessly, thoughtlessly from my lap, and wanders off.

Except she is not a cat.  She is a five year old girl.  This doesn't hit me right away which is shameful.  Later I think of this as some kind of karma for what happens next.

I am thirsty. I get up to leave.  The hall is packed.  My seat is taken instantly, no going back.  There are people standing in every aisle, some still on their commuter bikes complete with helmet.

I snake my way through the crowd to a very public water fountain.  Dozens of people idly watch me try to control the powerful jet of water that arcs up from the fountain and lands fifteen feet away in a hole on the manicured lawn of the lecture hall.  I drink and drink, feeling no relief from my thirst.  Eventually I stop because I am so exposed and wonder what people are thinking as they watch.

The talk must be over because people have begun streaming from the many entrances.  Which coincides with the first siren, a long wailing like an air raid.  We are in London, and that is in fact exactly what it is.  People stop, puzzled, milling, and actually look up as if to catch a glimpse of German bombers.

The evident power of cultural memory makes me smile; to a person every member of this crowd is too young to have been in a single bona fide air raid. 

Vignettes...

... from my first full night's sleep in a month.

I am sitting on a dirty cement stoop in front of a 15 storey apartment building.  The 30-something guy I met half an hour ago on the bus is whispering his life philosophy to me.   He's wearing a greasy used-to-be-white wool cap over his curly ginger hair; his cheeks are scruffy and weathered.

The late afternoon sun slinks into evening; the sky deepens endlessly.  A series of ever-more inebriated women walks past us up the wide shallow stairs, asking, or slurring, if this is the party for Cecilia, and we say yes.  We should know; we walked her here.

It's dark.  We've wandered deeper into the neighbourhood, on a sidewalk that winds illogically between grimy residential high-rises.  A man jumps out from the shadow cast by one of the infrequent trees backlit by even-more infrequent streetlamps.  My heart skips a beat then double times as he comes at us half-running.  Then opens his arms and hugs my companion.  They exchange loud incompehensible pleasanteries; he leaves.

I'm weeding my friend's garden.  I pull a up giant thistle out and find its roots embedded in the body of a decaying rat.  I gag.  Take a shovel and dig it out.  It's just as visceral and disgusting an experience as you imagine.

On the bus in Liverpool, a woman of impressive girth and height stands, gripping the overhead sling in one hand, the her six year old daughter's upper arm with the other, and argues loudly about motherhood with her sister.  I settle the dispute with Ring Pops.  We listen to the daughter's walkman without headphones, and sing along to Brittney.

Street corner.  Kirk Douglass passes me.  He's wearing a tan raincoat, nice shoes.  We say hi.

It must be the red wine

First work anxiety dream in Europe!   

I was attending a series of talks by grad students and upon arriving discovered no one had organized the pizza lunch.  I grabbed the phone to call Zeek's pizza and discovered we were in a room on the other side of campus not serviced by the pizza delivery.   The department head (an actually super-competent female PI in reality) said I should just run out and grab it from the north Capital Hill location.  I raised my voice a tiny amount and explained how that would take well over 45 minutes after I’d walked to my car, driven there and back, in traffic.  She shrugged and said then we’ll just drop it.  No, I insisted.  I will just miss the talks.   

Halfway to my car I got lost in the health sciences building (this could really happen actually) and had to ask a burgundy-scrubs-clad group of medical students which direction was west.  

I finally emerged from the building and found myself on the wrong side of campus, still half a mile from the car park.  I glanced at the program to estimate whether I'd get back in time for any of the talks and realized that the names were all of second year postdoctoral fellows and my name was listed halfway down the itinerary as a presenter.  

 I began to panic, mapping out how to get to my lab, grab computer and memory stick, write the talk, while driving to the pizza parlor and back.   

I opened my eyes in my friend’s guest room in Bordeaux, two hours into my post-french-lunch siesta, simultaneously relieved to not be delinquent and disappointed that I had not found a better solution to my dilemma than the cheater of waking up.

Werewolves of Paris (well, actually Bordeaux)

First anxiety dream of the European trip. 

Zombies who were werewolves, a classroom full of children, headmaster who didn’t believe in my imminent apocalyptic vision, mass slaughter, lots of running from menacing half-dead dog human hybrids.  The usual holiday slumber party.

Them's fighting words (dogs) ((moms))

I was having dinner with family on Capital Hill.  Since it was a dream, by "dinner" I mean a table at Harborview hospital cafeteria and by "family" I mean my mom, a random gay man I just met and his tall, blonde movie-star-looking "hag" (look it up in the urbandictionary if you aren't familiar), a group of unrelated-to-us grieving family members and a microphone built into the pale green plastic urinal on the wall beside the table through which my sister spoke, or rather sobbed, from a room deep inside the hospital where her boyfriend's aunt was dying.

I leaned into the wall as it was loud and echoey in the cafeteria, strained to hear and responded with an steady stream of "oh honey" and "I'm sorry", while roving nursing interns brought us trays of jello and weak coffee in plastic mugs.

Needless to say I was glad enough when dinner was over.

We exited the hospital and were immediately at the corner of Broadway and Denny, which  if you live here in Seattle you already know is unlikely without some kind of futuristic physics-based intervention*.

The lack of sci fi accessories in my dream notwithstanding, we prepared to cross Broadway heading east but mom was somehow walking faster (*see earlier note about the low probabilities of events lacking medium-to-far-future technological assistance) and I missed the light.

Mom ended up on the far side and as I mimed her an apologetic wait-for-me, she refocused her gaze slightly southward and began running back across the street against the light.  Someone a half block west on the opposite side of Denny was waving to her.

To reach her friend, mom had first to negotiate a phalanx of Matsumas (yes I know this is an easy-peel orange; in my dream they were a breed of irrationally aggressive guard dogs that would put a German Shepherd Pit Bull mix to shame) that occupied the entire crosswalk from north to south on the east side of the Broadway/Denny intersection.

The dogs were so aggressive that their owners typically blinded them, leaving them only their sense of smell to locate perpetrators (or mailmen, random passers-by, children, the elderly, squirrels, and any life forms, honestly, that consume oxygen as a means to survive).

Panic rose in my chest and time slowed to a thin molasses drip.  Moment by agonizing moment my mom inched closer, apparently oblivious to the enormous raging dogs in her path while I vainly yelled for her attention.  The owners were clearly in the same grip of fear; they frantically waved her off while struggling to maintain hands on leads at the ends of which strained and frothed their massive charges. 

My mother, it needs be said, even in waking life, is not easily deterred.  Certainly not by hoarsely screaming daughters.  Nor, inches from the first lunging snarling monster, by the tacit panic on the face of its owner who was clearly foreseeing having to watch their pet rip a woman into small pieces right in front of them.

Mom was at the very south end of the line of dogs and I prayed she would go around.  For a moment it looked like she had narrowly missed the dog, as she wove just south of the group.  But then I saw her stumble and go down.  Dogs that had been snapping and lunging in random directions, turned in terrifying unison toward the south sidewalk.

Though it sounds cliche, I am here to tell you that in that moment my heart was in my throat - and I do not mean that figuratively.  Other organs made similar threats of relocation as I lost sight of my mom in the converging dog mob. 

And then, miraculously, she popped up.  Stumbled once more, to which I will always attribute the loss of my spleen and 25% of my personal fortitude, but a small price to pay, for a moment later an owner offered her a hand up and she resumed her jog, apparently unscathed.

If you are a regular reader of this blog (and by that I mean you have read even one other post) you will know that happy endings really aren't the speciality of my unconscious mind. 

Despite the generally unrelenting science fiction horror show in my dreams, I strive to achieve gratitude on a daily basis on my non-dream life.

So today I am grateful that my mom was not eaten by a pack of semi-wild dogs.  The end.

No more gin before bed

A few patrons ahead of us in line at the donut store, the poet wore a floor-length emerald green robe with gold trim; he alternately quoted verses and flirted loudly with his sister.  My mother imprecated quietly in my ear, mainly about the Catholic church, since the poet's popular latest volume was dedicated to his priest - and all profits supposedly went to the local parish.

I worried they would run out of coffee before I got to the front counter; back in the schoolbus, five of my labmates waited for lattes and mochas.  With budget cuts in federal research money, charter buses had become a popular alternative to airlines as a means of transport to scientific meetings.

A few minutes later, I was riding in a converted van with my father.  I opened a trapdoor in the middle of the floor and peered down  into the dark subcompartment.

"Did you know there was a cat in a cage down here?"  I asked him.  I scanned the dim space anxiously, trying to determine if the animal was emaciated or dehydrated.

"What?" he responded.

"And a kitten.  No three kittens.  More cats.  There must be half a dozen caged cats!"  My voice echoed loudly in the space below, sounding more agitated than I actually felt; looking around the cats were clean, groomed. 

My father sighed.  "It's probably another rescue by your mother."  He shrugged.  

I woke groggy and parched, the most vivid memory that first moment looking through the floor at the cats, a sense of terror and sadness at what I might find.  A few days ago I'd had a dream I put two kittens in a tupperware container and half-killed them with neglect.

I'm going to assume that dreaming of healthy well-cared for cats is a better sign.  As for the preist, the poet, the schoolbus and my mom... I probably just need to hand that off to a starving comedian.

Space carnival accident

My father walked over to the big green plastic carnival ride.  It was broken but he glued it together, assuring me it would be "good as new in no time." 

He acted like it didn't bother him at all that a family friend had said something snarky last night about  my father's hobby re-building carnival rides: "It's not like he's sending rockets to the moon, or anything."  My father's cheerful banter as he worked meant, of course, that it bothered him a great deal.

The ride had a thick plastic green tree trunk of a base, into which fit a giant ball joint from which sprouted four extended arms.  From each arm dangled a small pod.  We had ridden it endlessly in summers of my childhood.

As it rotated, the pods would flare out in wide ruffling arcs, like one of the high speed swinging bucket centrifuges in my lab might do  if the operator ever lost his mind entirely and started a run without first balancing the load.

The ride normally sat four, the size of my nuclear family.  To test it, my father was loading just one pod with three people - himself, my mother, and the family friend, leaving the other pods empty. 

"Well," he smiled at me, zipping a silk jump suit up to his neck, "wish me luck."  He said it the way you might if your dangerous mission were going to the corner store for a liter of milk.  I nodded at him, smiled back.  He hopped into the pod and snapped shut the door.

My best friend and I watched the pod's progress on the video moniter he had rigged, next to an altimeter with a digital readout.  First I was confused, as we watched the numbers rapidly count backwards from 900.  Just before they reached 0, I understood that he had set the pod to shoot straight up.  It was unclear if he had meant it to go this high, but at 0 it would exit the earth's atmosphere and they would be in space.  Had my father been wearing a helmet?  

No sooner had the question entered my mind, it was answered: my father's head, a grainy black and white shadow in the moniter, changed from a single blob to a wispy spray, then dissipated into.  Nothing.  For another second, when the pod's other two passengers remained intact, I wondered if he had provided them with helmets.  Then their heads too became staticky confetti.

It is hard to describe that long moment, in which there was time for so many questions and regrets, like that old cliche about your life flashing before your eyes before death, only it was my final moments with my father that replayed in agonizing detail in the microseconds after I watched my parents die.

I remembered this sensation that had risen as his eyes met mine, right before he clambered into the pod.  I'd wanted to ask.  What he was doing.  Did he need anything.  Did he need anything special. And then he was gone.

There wasn't even time to fully process the event before I woke up, groggy, feeling hungover from last night's fried chicken.  The shock was wearing off and I began to mourn my family even as I realized it had been a dream.

It's such an odd feeling, this residue of grief matched with reality.  That didn't happen.  It wasn't real.  And still I feel such a sickening, terrible sense of guilt and sadness.  That I didn't ask the question.  Didn't understand.  Didn't insist.  Didn't even hug him goodbye.  I just let them go.  And then my family was gone, without fanfare, just a horrible, low resolution, soundless explosion.

Smuggling operation

I was hiding in the back of a closet in the cellar with my cat when the police battered down the door.  It was dark, - maybe 1030pm - by the time they broke in, but there had been a helicopter circling overhead with a floodlight for the last several hours.

I could hear them swarming through the house, then several sets of heavy boots clomped downstairs, and systematically "cleared" the basement rooms till they came upon me, curled in a ball around Tinkerbell, eyes closed.

Two officers pulled me up the stairs, not ungently, each one supporting me under one armpit, because my legs wouldn't work and my arms were full of warm grey fur.

I knew why they were there, because they told me, and I put a few more pieces together as they talked to me, but pretended complete ignorance as had always been my father's instructions. 

"If the police ever come and I am not here, you don't know nothin'," he'd say in his thick Louisiana dialect; and it wasn't hard it turns out, since I was hard-pressed to say much at the best of times, never mind at my kitchen table, in the middle of the night, surrounded by uniforms.

I recognized one of the female officers assigned to talk to me.  She was a case worker who had been trying for several weeks to get me to agree to something.  It was related to the legal trouble my father was already in over a smuggling operation.  She wanted me in an adult group home or maybe it was a kind of live-in therapy - in any case, something that would require me to leave my home with my father, which I was quite certain I did not want to do. 

She had talked to me about my future and potential and used other big words for hours and I would just nod and take whatever brochures and material she handed me and throw it in the recycling as soon as she was out the door.

The trouble my father was already in had to do with moonshine, which I knew was a slang term for alcohol, but this new thing was about guns and I had no difficulty pretending I had no idea that guns were being assembled or sold in my house because I had no idea about anything related to guns. 

It seemed unbelievable and I said so, proud I could say something helpful with complete honesty.  I liked it so much, I said it a few more times, for emphasis.

This is what I knew that I didn't tell the police.  Shortly before I got home from school, I got a text from my dad saying he was going to meet one of the officers on his case unofficially - "on da side," to see if he could get him to cut dad a break on the smuggling charges. 

When I did get home dad and uncle Charlie weren't there.  There wasn't a note but there were dark boot prints going from the side door to the garage, and the kitchen was filthy with fine black soot that stood out starkly on the white linoleum floor and faux granite countertop in the kitchen. 

So I swept and mopped all the floors and wiped the kitchen counters till it was all gone, then threw the sponge away in the incinerator out back which was exciting because it mini-exploded when I opened the door of the firebox and threw it in. 

I went back into the house and called for Tinkerbell to feed her but she didn't come.  By then it was getting darker, and I started to feel panicky and I heard a helicopter circling.  After searching the whole house, I noticed the cellar door, always locked, was strangely ajar. 

I heard sirens, far away, then closer.  They cut abruptly as car after car pulled up to the house.  I went around turning off all the lights, pulling closed the blinds so I could see out but they could not see in, a trick my father taught me.  I heard a single "mew" from downstairs so I went down the cellar stairs, slowly, each step bringing me closer to a cooler dankness than I was used to.

Just as I reached her, huddled against the washing machine, the cops were coming up the front stairs of the veranda.  I peeked out the cellar window, at the flashing red and blue splashing over my front yard.  They were bringing a long, thick black something up the walk, two men needed to carry it so it must have been heavy.  I turned, picked up Tinkerbell, and squeezed into the back of the pantry, buried my face in the cat's warm flank.  And that is where they found me.