I’ve been having strange dreams recently. Colors and tastes and textures not often seen in real life. Perhaps on the set of a movie or in a world manufactured by Michael Eisner, but not here, and certainly not there and definitely never in Green Bay Wisconsin. Lots of slick reds and yellows so glowy that it becomes painful to look at them and blacks so black they seem to hold religious value. I have never seen blacks as black as that.
I had a tiny mind movie at the Tori Amos concert. (which, by the way, I ended up somehow with a THIRD set of free tickets that went unused). The songs began to blend together and I was hidden under my jacket with my feet up on the railing, comfortable, so much more comfortable than a wooden backed chair should have been, cocooned in a chamber made of sound and light, sung by a woman who began to look like a witch from far away, when I squinted at her and I could only squint.
My eyes had gotten blurry and the lights kept collecting in the corners and chasing away my blinks. Until the women with leaves for hair was gone and the lights with the vine gels over them stopped spinning and I was back on our horse farm, the farm we had when I was six and seven.
I was collecting water from stumps because I suspected that it was poison. I was going to use it to kill my stepfather.
He had threatened to kill my mother and maybe me and then run away with my baby sister the previous night. So I was going to be prepared. And I planned to live in the 29-acre woods on our farm where the police would never think to look and sneak back to the barn to sleep at night in Bunny’s stall’ the motherly Palomino that was gentle and never kicked.
Once before the premeditation of his murder, I had been walking and got that shiver scary that you always get when you’re walking in the woods and the trees behind you gather closer and hide you from where you came. I braved onward, pretending I was a boy and not a girl who slept with a teddy bear already looking ratty from being accidentally covered with puke. I listened to the heartbeat in my ears subside and waited for the urge to pee my pants to settle down. But it never did. And then the feeling that someone was watching me hit a crescendo. I saw adult men through the trees watching me, materializing as though they had been there all along and it had taken some time for my eyes to adjust. Like darkness. Like seeing shapes in the night you think is a monster but it is only a bureau, but this was in reverse. They were dressed in old clothes, buckskin and beads, with long hair not braids as you see in movies, but long and wild. I wasn’t really afraid until I saw their eyes, which were white, only white and lit up in the bright sunlight as though there were a flashlight in their brains shining out at me. Lighting me up. Somehow making me feel guilty, as though I had stolen their eyes.
I had run back down the path screaming.
I decided that if I poisoned my step father, I would be put to death by lethal injection. I liked the way that sounded. Lethal Injection. I did not realize that Wisconsin was not a death penalty state. Or perhaps the police would burn me the way the Stormtroopers burned Luke’s aunt and uncle. So the plan was to go hide in the woods and well, if the light-eyed men came for me, I would explain to them that my aunts were both Native American and their dad was sort of like my grandfather and gave me beads once and I’d give it to them if they would show me how to pretend to be a birch tree the way that they did so well. And I would show them where I buried three baby bunnies that my stepfather had brought back (after he realized that he shot their mother) and I would show them where I let the fourth one go. And I would explain to them that I buried the snake that was run over in our driveway, which would prove right there that I didn’t just care for the cute animals, I had respect for all of them. I just wouldn’t look into their eyes. That’s all. I would just look at the ground so I wouldn’t see their light.
My stepfather didn’t kill us. Which was a good thing because my mother wouldn’t give me one of the good glasses to put the stump water into (which I had planned so very cannily switch for his water glass at dinner time because I was clever like Halley Mills). He didn’t die a retching violent death spewing stump algae. Such a waste of a perfectly poetic end for a villain. The devil is in the details.
But I did fill his 8-track tape deck with Johnson & Johnson Baby Lotion. Just to show him the damage I was capable of.
It’s probably a good thing, anyway, as he would haunt me to this day. And I’m certain that I wouldn’t be as ravishing a murderess as Queen Latifah or Catherine Zeta-Jones. I would have ended up as somebody’s bitch. Women’s prison is the worst place in the world for a girl with the Lesbian Catnip condition and Curvy Round Sex Goddess thing going on. But was it a memory or was it a dream. Or a memory of a dream. There are enough truths to make it reality and enough omissions to make the worst truth seem like a trifle. I remember the panic (that’s where the root of the word came from’ Pan’ the thought that Pan was frightening you out of his kingdom) when I’d walk in our forest. I remember the collections of ingredients, the potions that I’d make, usually involving ground burdock and nightshade and pulverized thistles. I remember the men with light instead of eyes but just don’t know what I’m remembering anymore. But I know the part about the 8-track tape did happen because while ghosts and premeditated murders may seem fuzzy, rather spectacular punishments are quite crystal.
The dreams aren’t all uncomfortable. I had one this morning about sitting alone in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate State Park, working on my laptop, listening to the rain and eating little spicy crackers while drinking green tea. It was quite lovely but also very very real, the sound of the rain, the gurgle of the waterfalls, the sound of footsteps on the wet paving stones. When I woke, I thought I smelled the green mossy rain and could taste the nip of the crackers.
Brains are so cool. We’re so very lucky to have them. But to be truthful, I’m a bit uncertain whether I should be nervous or thrilled to fall asleep tonight.
