When I opened the door of the small, dilapidated shack and moonlight illuminated a figure, I had expected to see two strange beings dressed like a green angel and a gargoyle reaching out of the darkness to capture me. To my surprise, I found a little girl staring up at me with large understanding eyes. Standing behind her were two other men, but I was relieved to see that these were not the same men who were pursuing me. I recognized one of them as my neighbor’s husband, a large guy with had long dark hair. The other stranger wore a scraggly beard and a worn gray t-shirt that didn't quite cover a protruding belly. They appeared to be guarding the girl, and now, seeing that I was in dire need, they took on the added responsibility of helping me as well. In an instant, we were all running across the open field. I glanced back to see if the strange beings were coming. The small shack of a house with only two walls left standing fell back in the distance as I followed the two men and the little girl across the field to the car that waited under the carport of a nearby house.
The car was an old 1970’s light blue metallic clunker with a white vinyl top. Graffiti had been painted all over the body of the car. My neighbor slid in behind the wheel as the little girl and I settled into the back seat. I could hear the tires spinning on gravel as we backed out of the carport and tore off down the road.
"You’d better buckle up,” I told the little girl as I did the same. Without commenting, she did as she was told.
As we mounted the interstate, we passed a building complex, apartments perhaps, that caught my eye. The outer rooms were shaped like large pastel-tinted Tupperware bowls with plastic lids. The bowl-shaped rooms didn’t seem level, and they gave the impression that they could slide right off the flat surface upon which they were built.
"They don’t look level," said the guy in the front passenger’s side.
"That’s just an illusion. They really are level," my neighbor said.
"The rooms don’t seem very big."
“On the inside, they look huge.” He spoke as if he’d been there before.
We came to a point where the interstate split, and we veered right, going under an overpass. We could tell by his driving that my neighbor's attention wasn't on the road as he rambled on about shapes of buildings. The bearded passenger looked nervously at the road.
“Hey, could you watch your driving?” He asked.
“I am," my neighbor said, a defensive edge to his voice. "I’m doing okay.”
I didn’t know where we were going, or why. I only had a feeling of excitement in those moments just before I awoke, thinking that I could go back and tell my friend what truths I had discovered. About events that had already happened but no one really knew what exactly had happened, and now I could tell them because I had been there... somehow. I knew who burned the church and why. In those last moments before I awoke, I knew everything.
I can’t remember exactly how it started, but the first thing I remember is that I got really emotional when a woman at work... a woman who I didn’t know very well... gave me a gift. It was a strange gray clay-like sculpture, and I was intrigued when she told me that it was a pencil sharpener and showed me how to use it. I think I actually began to cry at that point.
Later I was talking with an older woman who seemed to fulfill the role as my employer in my dream. I wasn’t very well acquainted with her, since I had only just begun the new job, but I found myself alone with her. She was thin and had black hair and wore an unusual beaded headdress. I put on the headdress to see what the weight of the beads felt like, and I began to dance around. She seemed to take a liking to me.
She told me that she was going to have to stop teaching pottery class because of her hands. They always felt cold, and the cold hurt. She couldn’t get any relief for the cold that ran through her hands. I held her hand in my own for a while, and she was grateful as her hand began to warm up. I sat there and held her hands for a long time.
The place where I worked in my dreamed was similar to a circus in some ways, and to an animal hospital in others. In one moment I was looking into a cage at what was supposed to be an animal. A small boy sat next to the cage. This was his pet. The animal was tied down for his own safety and everyone else’s, too. As I observed, I realized that there were a few unusual things about the animal. The first thing was that the pet was a giant squid. Secondly, the giant squid was invisible. Thirdly, the invisible giant squid pet wore a costume of none other than pink tubular balloons.
I leaned too close to the squid, and he managed to rake a balloon-covered tentacle over my hand. The scrape burned painfully, and people garbed in hospital scrubs came close to look at my hand. I was taken to a room that I knew was used to treat animals under normal conditions, but they shoved my hand under a large magnifying glass that was well-lit by an adjustable overhead light. The woman took a sterile tool and began to scrape at the flower-shaped clusters of blisters that had begun to rise up on my hand along the scrape. The blisters were poison, and once she had raked the blisters away, she felt confident that my hand would be okay.
My mother was there, explaining that my brother was in a play in which he played a one-year old elephant who happened to be jealous of his younger sibling elephant.
I left Mom, and I was walking along the outer rim of the workplace and talking to a co-worker. We were talking about my marriage. We came to a point where people were running in circles and jumping hurdles that looked like the headboards and footboards of beds. There were all different shapes of headboards, and the people kept running by and jumping these hurdles on their way to fulfill whatever important job needed fulfilling. The girl and I stopped to straighten some of the hurdles.
In another moment, I was in a building, a stone building with a tall ceiling and stone floor. The window reached over my head and to the ground, and there was no glass in the window. Several colored girls were running and swinging through the window. They were laughing and happy. A lemon tree stood outside the window, about a hundred yards or so away. The tree was loaded down in lemons, and the scent of lemons was very strong. The field was green and full of white blooming grasses. The sky had a magical golden tint to it, and lemon leaves were scattered on the stone floor of the building.
My mother appeared, telling me in a silky smooth voice that this was my place. My special place. There was a swing in front of me, and she said that all this belonged to me. I looked down and there was a book on the floor. My mother told me that this was were we came from, and I picked up the book.
I opened the book and there was a thank you note in it to a certain school. The book was for the people who’d settled just East of the Mississippi in a place called Sunshine. I turned to the first page, and it seemed to be a sort of dictionary containing words for obsolete farm equipment, and the very names for the items had fallen out of use. The words almost seemed like another language. The next thing I knew, I was in a class, and the people were singing the words in the book. Each row of students took turns singing the words. I didn’t know the song, and I was nervous about my turn. So I decided to do something risky. I put on a turban and costume, and I danced up and down the aisle. The other students laughed and clapped, and when it was over, I saw down behind my sister on the far right side of the class.
“What gave you the idea to do that?” She asked.
“It’s been done before,” I said. She didn’t understand, but I knew that all this had happened before, except I hadn’t been the one playing the role. That person had been someone else, and these people didn't realize that all of this had happened before. This was a first time for their lives.
The men who were after me weren’t really men at all, and though they looked like angels, they weren’t really the good kind of angels that we often think of. I saw the upright coffin open and two men unfold themselves from within it. One dressed in a green angel costume, similar to a fairy with irridescent green scales on his wings and suit. The other, a gray stone-like beast resembling a gargoyle. The two looked around, and they began to walk slowly, with stiffness in their legs from having been cooped up for so long, but they had such a sinister look about them that I knew I could not escape them forever.
There was a third, another green angel, and they all followed after me, to take something from me. A book perhaps. Or just knowledge. Whatever it was, I shoved it into a gap in a brick cornerstone where the mortor had fallen away. It was flat and shaped like a notebook or manuscript. I crammed the object into the cornerstone and began to run. I’d have to come back for it later.
As I was running from the strangely garbed men, I found my way to the crumbling shack, and I reached for the doorknob. The door jerked open suddenly, and I gasped as I expected to come face to face with the very men I was trying to evade. Only, it was the little girl’s face that I saw. A face of innocence. One who knew something that made her dangerous to the bad men, and so she had to be protected. I stepped into the house, and then found the welcome faces of friends, not enemies.
As for what happened to the church, all that memory has left me now. I don’t remember what happened. Perhaps the three men took whatever knowledge they came looking for. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to remember.