In Dreams

To preface this story. I had a dream about this last night (in much less detail), but it was the basis for the story. When it starts to get gurped, those are the true excerpts from my dream. Enjoy.

Every summer I went to go visit my aunt and uncle in a small suburb of Baton Rouge, Louisiana called Zachary. I had been visiting them since I was born, but it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I started to go on my own. The town had the typical small town feel. No one drove cars; people usually walked everywhere, rode bikes, or skateboarded. It made the town have this eerie white noise that I wasn’t used to.

My aunt and uncle’s house was a small three bedroom with a large backyard. The archways from room to room had a cathedral design to them and all the walls were painted an odd burnt sienna color. The room I stayed in had a bay window that overlooked the well kept garden in the backyard. I would wake up every morning and be greeted by my cheerful aunt and uncle with breakfast and a newspaper. It was the local newspaper, so it had very few national news stories in it. I read it anyway, because I enjoyed reading the events section. The town events were what everyone did at night, you did not miss them. They could vary from dances, to huge barbeques. I loved it. My aunt and uncle both smoked cigarettes in the house, so a few years after I began smoking, I got the courage to have after breakfast cigarettes with them.

The one convenience store was on the corner of Old Baker road and New Weis road, and had two entrances, one for a small sit down buffet, and the other for things like candy and cigarettes. Jasmine was the old woman who owned the store, she wore the same white sweater every day, but changed the broach she wore on the left collar. She would always have a different insect as the broach, but as she told me, her favorite was a spider with an opal abdomen. She had a sort of mysteriousness about her, when she spoke, at first; you couldn’t really tell if she was speaking English or not, but when you got into the habit of hearing her voice you could decipher what she was saying. The year I started to smoke cigarettes when I was about 17 she said, “I was wondering when you were going to start smoking.”

I spent most of the hot afternoons in black cutoff shorts made from old dickies walking up and down Baker road until it turned into Old Baker road where the convenience store was. I would buy a pack of Kamel Reds and a Sprite, then walk down to Jefferson Park and lay on my back in the grass until the day cooled off. In Zachary the temperature could be a constant 100 degrees from eight to five.

What I loved about my yearly trips to Zachary was I had a whole circle of friends that I had grown up with there. I had my friends at home and my friends in Zachary, both equally as close. We had a great balance of both girls and guys too. Most of the kids I hung out with were a lot like me. We all enjoyed drinking, smoking cigarettes, and also getting high. When we got older, we would play poker games and drink way too much, and I would stumble home to my aunt and uncle’s house, and most likely fall asleep with all my clothes on in the living room.

When I got into my mid twenties I still took a few weeks off every summer to go visit Zachary. I had a great job with a design firm that let me do my work remotely while I was visiting.

When I was twenty six, it got weird. I don’t remember how I arrived in Zachary that summer, but I woke up in my aunt and uncle’s house in a room I had never been in before. The walls seemed like they were not connected and I felt like I was too large for the room. The odd part about this summer was I did not see my aunt and uncle once while I visited, which made me second guess whether I was actually there. I was slipping in and out of reality every few hours and the vagueness of my mind was scaring me. I left the house the outside air was very cold and it didn’t match the normal climate of Zachary. I walked down Old baker road and saw two young boys delivering the paper. I thought to myself, “Okay, I’m fine.” As I got closer to the boys I realized they were identical twins, except one was dressed in all red and one was dressed in all blue. I heard them talking, and they had the voices of old men. One of them threw a newspaper to a second story apartment deck and missed it by a few inches. The ad’s that were inserted into the Sunday edition slowly floated to the ground at my feet. The other twin grumbled in his aged voice “You need to get more arch in your throw, David.” He proceeded to toss another Sunday edition perfectly to the porch. I was immediately back into this clouded imaginary mindset. The boy’s voices entered my head and made me very confused. I split ways with them to try and escape this imaginary realm I was in, but I could hear them the whole way to the convenience store. It haunted me like a night terror. When I got to the convenience store I was greeted by a young woman with a white sweater on and an opal broach in the form of a spider. I immediately assumed she was Jasmine’s daughter trying to keep the image of the convenience store alive. I asked her, “How is your mother Jasmine doing?” She looked at me very puzzled and said, “I am Jasmine…” The opal spider jumped off her collar and started to crawl up my neck; I swatted at it and we both fell to the ground. I was staring at the opal spider dead on. I stood up and tried to smash it with my foot, but it seemed to know my every move and jumped out of the way of my shoe. A man behind me with a remote control in his hand yelled at me to stop. “What are you doing? I just finished building that robotic spider, and you’re trying to kill it!” I bought my cigarettes and my sprite, and exited the store.

I walked down to the area near Jefferson Park, while the streets warped themselves around each other. It was hard to walk and I felt like I was moving in circles. I never made it to Jefferson Park that day.

When I woke up I was in the middle of an outdoor dance with loud music playing and strings of lights hung everywhere. I was sitting at a table with all of my friends from Zachary, all laughing and obviously drunk. They didn’t seem to notice anything weird about me, and when I came to my senses I realized I was very drunk as well. I looked down at three empty glasses with ice in them. I had no recollection of how I had got to this dance or of meeting up with my friends. I was sitting next to a girl I had been involved with for many years, named Lisa. She was staring deep into my eyes and I was slipping out of reality for what seemed like the twentieth time today. No one else seemed to notice my existence except Lisa. When I would speak to my friends they would answer my questions through someone else. I could only see the sides of people’s faces and when I would try and move to another angle to see them they would move their head as well. Aside from all of the melting of the lights into people’s faces, and the fact I only existed to one person, the dance was great. I immediately remembered why I loved Zachary, everyone was dancing with each other, and everyone was either laughing or getting ready to laugh. Lisa and I danced for what seemed like four hours.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, “It really is true, age breaks people apart, even though I saw you last year.”

I couldn’t speak, but I thought to myself, “It’s true, but you’re still as beautiful as you were last summer, if not more.”

She replied blushing almost instantly, “Oh, stop.”

I couldn’t speak, but we could still communicate. The rest of the night was as much of a blur as the day had been. I woke up at my friend Danny’s house sitting at a poker table with about two hundred dollars in chips. I could speak now, and everyone was staring at me.

“Rob, call or raise.” said Danny.

I looked down at my cards and saw and Ace and King suited. I said raise and put twenty dollars in the pot. Everyone folded except Lisa, who called my raise, as she stared into my eyes. “Could she still read my thoughts?” I asked myself. We went back and forth raising a few times, until I finally succumbed and called her.

“Alright, what do you guys have?” asked Danny.

I put down my cards, expecting to win, but Lisa showed her pocket Aces and smiled.

We kept drinking as the night went on, telling stories and making fun of each other. I got up to go to the bathroom and saw a door in Danny’s house I had never seen before. I walked into the room and my feet felt comforted by the light brown shag carpet. There was a small coffee table and a brown couch in the room. The walls were adorned with pictures of me and my family, which I thought was very odd for Danny to have in his house. I heard a noise behind me and turned around abruptly. I had knocked over what seemed to be a glass bong. I heard a crashing noise as it hit the floor, and felt bad I had broke Danny’s bong. When I reached down to pick up the bong and gather the pieces, it was intact, but it was made out of a tarp like material. It was clear, red color and I could see the water inside of it. I examined it and was curious to see if this “tarp-bong” worked. There was a bowl already packed in it, so I got out my lighter and started to hit it. The sides of the bong got sucked in as I was hitting the bowl. “Shit just keeps getting weirder,” I thought to myself.

I walked Lisa home after we left Danny’s house. She kissed me and we parted ways. It was very dark out, and in Zachary there are very few street lights, and as I got closer to my house, the lights started to go out almost syncronized. It was very peaceful not being able to see all the fucked up shit Zachary was doing to me, and for the first time on this trip I felt normal. In the distance I heard the two twins throwing news papers at houses speaking in their horrifying old men voices. I tried to tune them out by singing.

When I got to my aunt and uncle’s house, they were still not home. I felt very lonely, so I put on a VHS of Looney Tunes and went to sleep on the couch.

I woke up running. I had my bags hung from both of my shoulders, and somehow I knew where to run. I arrived at a bus station I had never seen in Zachary. There were about 30 busses all full with people staring at me as I ran by. Each bus had a destination pinned up on it, but I was very confused, they all were destinations in California all near where I lived. Someone grabbed my hand and whisked me onto a bus, they disappeared somewhere before I got thank them. After the bus started to roll away, I realized that I was not in Zachary anymore but I was leaving a bus station in Northern Washington, driving south to San Francisco. I looked around and everyone was minding their own business, not staring at me anymore. I was sitting next to a little girl wearing a white sweater with a small opal spider broach. I was expecting to slip back into the stream of hallucinations I was in all week, but the little girl just looked up at me and smiled. I put my head back in my seat, closed my eyes, and fell asleep to the peaceful sound of the buses tires on the road.

-Robert Belmont