Dream Journal
I stood in an organ donor’s dorm room. I told B that no one had wanted to look through her things after her death, but I would because it was very important.
Riding down the dorm’s outdoor glass elevator looking over the snowy campus, I asked Jeff if he remembered how we were when we first met. He leaned close and I wanted to kiss the soft spot under his jaw and feel his arms around me. There were two others in the elevator unaware of this tension between us.
At my mother’s house, I asked her to try the three different kinds of ice cream I was testing for Steve’s birthday. She refused to taste them, saying that she doesn’t like coffee, but I convinced her to try them.
I took the ice cream maker into the back room to clean it in the large tub sink. I ran water through each of the metal and plastic pieces, flushing out all of the leftover ice cream.
Done cleaning the machine, I went back into the kitchen and found the small white cups of ice cream untouched and melting. I was annoyed at my mom for not trying them like she said she would.
I was with Melissa and my parents on the boat. There had been previous damage to the boat, and I was trying to hold the mast with the crow’s nest up straight ant tall because it was very wobbly and I didn’t want it to break. I asked my dad if I could let it lean back against the boom, but he got very angry that I had even suggested it.
The waves got bigger and bigger; one was so big that it flipped and flopped the boat all around. We swirled under water with the boat as it spun. Everything got dark as we went under water, but I had a pocket of air and for that i was grateful - I was sure no one else had a pocket of breathing air.
The boat’s spinning and twisting slowed down and I wondered if I would be stuck in this pocket of air under water not knowing which way was up. When I finally found the surface, my parents and Melissa were nowhere in sight. I knew that they had gone for help.
The boat had righted itself and I went into the cabin to wait. I sat for a while when I noticed the boat was heading too quickly into a very small cove. The cove had cliff walls on all sides and I knew the boat would hit the cliffs if I didn’t do something. I rushed to get into the top house, and my feet kept slipping on the wet stair rungs.
Finally up in the captain’s chair, I stared at the levers and couldn’t remember which ones did what. I needed to put the boat into reverse immediately.
I turned around so I wasn’t looking at the cliffs and pulled on the levers to my left as hard as I could. The boat sped up a bit, so I pulled them in the opposite direction. The boat stalled and pushed backward a very little bit.
I was proud of myself for thinking of it and for being lucky, but didn’t want to turn around and see how close it was. I wondered if I should try to drop the anchor or if anyone would look for me in this little cove.
Then I was waiting in line with the other kids my age from the church as they were getting recognition for certain things. We each had a different vegetable sliced and arranged on a plate to present, and I held the tomatoes.
Tina said something to me and I slapped her, unappreciative of her attitude. She laughed to show me what she had said didn’t mean much of anything. A church deacon called each of our names, and everyone went up one at a time to present their vegetable and get recognition for their work during the previous year.
I waited and waited; since I was the oldest I would have been called last, but he never called my name. He had moved on to some other topic and I was very hurt that I had been left out. I had accomplished just as much as everyone else that had been called, and I still held the plate of bright red sliced tomatoes.
I looked at a graph of all of our cooperation over the last year, and mine was just as much as anyone else’s. I didn’t understand why I had been left out.
Then I was on shore eating a very fancy dinner with my family. One girl at another table kept jumping up to wave to her fiancé who was leaving on a ship for a very long time.
She wore a very nice but simple long white dress from an older era. She noticed the ship had stopped moving forward, and she knew that he was coming in for one last goodbye. She jumped up from her table very excited that a few other patrons, my father included, went over to the window to look at the ship.
I went into the kitchen to get away from all of the ship talk. When I came out of the kitchen, she grabbed my hand and asked me to bring a tray for her fiancé to take off his coat. The only thing I could find was an old, greasy and rusty baking sheet, but she had me follow her anyway.
We met her fiancé outside the restaurant and when she offered to hang his jacket over my baking sheet, he turned his nose away. I offered to hold his jacket with my hand, but he didn’t hear me and kept his jacket on.
We followed his straight back and fancy uniform inside the restaurant. I didn’t like him.
Steve and I were on a road trip. We stopped at a small general store in a tiny town on the side of the highway. We told the two elderly owners behind the counter about a creature that had been kiling neighbor animals. We urged them to stay safe, and they were grateful of our warning.
The four of us walked over to the store windows and watched two cop cars pull into the parking lot. Four officers stepped out of each car, eight total, and pulled a man into the middle of the highway.
The officers surrounded the kneeling man with their guns, a shotgun pointed at his head. I said aloud, “They’re going to execute him,” and turned away because I didn’t want to watch. I heard a gunshot and Steve’s face blanched.
We decided to leave town. We packed the trunk while Lacey looked for a place to poop. An officer came over and asked if we were staying for dinner - we had been invited because we had warned them about the creature killing all of the animals.
We declined the dinner invitation, saying that we need to move on. The officer turned into a fox and went over to sniff Lacey while she was trying to poop. Irritated, she kept moving over a little bit to get away from the fox’s nose, spreading tiny poop pellets everywhere.
I tried to start picking the poop up with a baggie, wishing the fox would leave her alone. We couldn’t leave until all of the poop was cleaned up.
Themes: Steve
I was walking through an abandoned, grassy parking lot in Homer. Once on the sidewalk, I started in the direction toward Safeway but stopped when I saw three donor charts sitting in a box on the sidewalk.
I looked around but saw no one. I wondered who would have left confidential charts here on the sidewalk in Homer and why. I picked them up and took them with me.
Back at the office, I headed toward the CEO’s office to ask him about the errant charts and had to push my way through the group of the coordinators talking in the file room.
I stopped at the CEO’s door and thought about the lingerie order I had placed on the company account. Even though I had paid for it with my own personal money, the three items would still appear on the company invoice. The finance woman and the CEO would see it and be upset that I was using company resources for personal activities.
I realized that if I went to the CEO about the charts, he would want to know about the lingerie. I considered cancelling the lingerie order, but knew they will still show up on the invoice as CANCELLED.
I stood frozen, not knowing what to do.
B and I walked into a nearly empty pub and sat down at the bar. He ordered a beer and a woman beside me asked what was on the bottom of my bottle.
I picked a bottle up and saw that it had a wooden token imprinted with a saying stuck to the bottom. I tore off the token and a man came around the corner, growling that we took his seat and his beer. I apologized and stood up leaving B at the bar.
I wandered into another room, bored by the people and the atmosphere. Aunt Judy was in the other room, so was Meg. I gave them both very big hugs.
I was then in the care driving home when I heard a scratching sound in the very back. I asked aloud, “What are you doing?” Taylor was lying on the floor in the back scratching at the speaker; I told her to stop it.
At home, I let the dog out. My neighbor was standing on their back porch and staring at my apartment. Lacey urinated and we went back inside, but she acted antsy. I let her back out, but she still didn’t calm down. All the while, my neighbor stood on the port staring at my apartment.
I turned on the television inside and all of the channels are just static. I picked up the phone and hear a strange static-y sound and then silence. I picked up my cell phone, but it was blinking a battery signal even though the batter was fully charged.
I knew all of this was because of the zombie invasion. I wondered how I would communicate with family and wondered where B was. I picked up the phone again and waited through the static and the silence until an operator came on.
I asked her why the phones were down, she said that they were only down locally, but I could make a long distance call. I thanked her and wished her hope on what would surely be a long ande stressful shift, and we hung up. I wondered about the internet, whether it would work because it was a cable connection instead of a phone line.
I went into the office and tried to draw the curtains very slowly without turning on the light becase I knew the neighbor was still watching my apartment, and he creeped me out.
B walked through the door and handed me a piece of paper with EMERGENCY written at the top in big, bold red. He had filled it out with his name and phone number and address, then wrote a special note to me. The note was hardly legible because of tears in the paper, but the last part said to get to New York if I could.
He went into the computer room and sat down at the computer. I came in after him and saw he had replaced my lamp with a huge bright super lamp with many, many small light bulbs all over it.
I asked if he could move it over some because it was shining in my eyes. He got upset and said no, that it wasn’t too bright. I looked at the bulbs and saw that half of them were 100 watt, and the others were 40s and 60s. He disagreed, said they were all soft 40s, but moved it back a bit anyway.
I sat down at my computer directly to his left and was annoyed at his presence. It had been a very long time since we had used the computers together because of his schedule, and I had gotten to like it.
I pulled up my black and orange, swirly website and thought about posting something about the zombie invasion, wondered if I should wait until tomorrow since I had already posted something that day.
I waited for my email to load to see if my family had tried to contact me and he opened EverQuest. I was upset that he would take the time to play a game when we had to move into survival mode.