This is not leap year. I have forgotten the list I was given in the dream--truths about myself--in the Chinese knickknack boutique. There were at least ten or eleven of them, and the first had to do with that conversation with N about L, where N asked me why nobody could bear to be around L "any more," including me. But I had never been able to bear him. And also in the dream the Orange Line trains, leaving as they used to from an above-ground station, and me walking through the puddles to them on platform shoes, not getting my feet wet. The pleasant warm puddles. And the whole good feeling of the dream, perhaps because I picked up the old understanding from G, and from R too, with his terrible dead flapping feet. G was always so tall? A Provincetown dream? A tray of handmade earrings. Then at work one day I used the word "Muriel," deliberately, in place of a more boring word, and everyone laughed. Must have been the thin handwriting and the lungfish in the natural history museum. Might have been the lionfish, though, or the coelacanth. Those lacy dark skeletons; one of them might be mine. Three hundred and eighty years old I think it said. Or something older.

Transformed

     I would love to interpret C's dream, the dream in which I'm "transformed" (his word), into a "small, dome-shaped cookie." He paused between small and dome-shaped, emphasizing each word. I should backtrack. He woke up after the second night of a terrible coughing head cold and stroked my arm just above the elbow gently with his forefinger. I wasn't awake yet. He knows I don't like to be wakened up for just anything, so I knew this was important. I said mmmmmmmm. He laughed. He said, "I woke you up to hug you." I turned over, lay in his arms, but before I even got there he said, "I had the most horrible dream about you. You were somehow transformed into a small-dome-shaped- cookie." Now that I think about it, "dome-shaped" probably got the most emphasis. I asked to hear more. He sounded bereft. He said he'd been with another man (maybe P maybe D he couldn't remember who, it kept changing) and they realized that somehow I'd been transformed into a small dome-shaped cookie, but that they could still communicate with me if they kept me "moving through air," so they kept on floating around somehow until finally they couldn't keep it up any more and I (the cookie) dropped to the floor and cracked into pieces. He put the cookie in a plastic bag but he couldn't communicate with me then; that was the end of me, and he began to sob and sob and the other man began to sob and sob and C said "I only get to know her for five years?" and was so bereft that even after waking he could still feel the pain for a while. Then he woke me up. I wanted to know where the dream came from; I said you must feel bad about me in some way, afraid of losing me, or that you can't communicate with me somehow, or that there's a chance that will happen. He thought and coughed and finally said I'm too sick to think about it. He got up to go to work. I lay there with the big cat. I stretched my arms up and looked at them. I felt sad, sneezy. I went upstairs and kissed his head as he sat at the computer. He offered me toast. He left for his job. As he walked down the driveway he told me my voice sounded funny.


Contents

 Diane

 Wald