had to pick up mom and dad at a spring dance in a white limo i pushed around with my bare hands.

a gathering of high school, dearest friends cooking dinner someone's beautiful home. instead, we became distracted by a giant black rat up to something in the laundry room. we had an automatic relationship of mutual trust with him for some reason. when we let him out, he dragged the corpse of his most recent mouse victim up the wall to the mantle. He and we, the audience, treated the mantle as his stage as we gaped at his meticulous performace: with a surgeon's precision he removed the innards of his mouse which were neither dry nor wet but tiny tubes, opaque white encasing bright blue. I don't remember if we clapped afterwards, but our collective amazement applauded him. Dinner time came and my friend's mom insisted we taste the seal she had prepared, just because there was a ton of it in the fridge and she needed to get rid of it. It was uncooked, yet the outside appeared as the bark of a tree, but bright green, cracked, and overgrown with broccoli-shaped growths. After it was cut open, the insides spilled out: a cross between chunky clear jelly and sushi rice. No one was disgusted.

All blackness but spotlights like a movie set. I was still in high school, but couldn't go this day because I was sick with the problem of my teeth coming out. They didn't fall or anything, but came out as if glued together between the cracks--a mouth shaped set, newly removable both top and bottom. And the spaces ached without the roots. On the way to spending the day shopping at an underground mall with a friend, I adopted the habit of taking my teeth out to have him gape at what was beneath them--a powdery, blackish burnt umber surface dry as if colored with conti crayon. My youngest sister was even younger (Martha, 15) and also sick, so she came along as we took the elevator down to the shops. The doors parted to reveal what looked like the dullest doctor's waiting room--off white walls and a crowded, friendly reception desk. It was then that I remembered the one task mom left us for the day: to drop off a card, marked with an 8 digit code, at this very desk so the clown would remember Martha's upcoming birthday party.

There was a storm coming; I had to get back to France. Our family was vacationing in the middle of nowhere Great Britain at a junky house-turned hotel. When we arrived there was no one in sight, so we went snooping for who would normally be the man behind the desk. The decor had the tacky flair of mid-western American farm house, but all adhered to a Union Jack theme. After passing a fiesty French couple screaming in the hall despite their infant accesory, we discovered the hotel manager sprawled out sleeping in what would become my room. The storm was still coming, so I excused myself to use the phone. It had a never-ending cord. Holding the reciever up to my ear, I walked over railroad tracks to a pond-side pier where I staged my call, leaning one hip against the rotting wooden railing. A train approached in the distance, so I held up the phone cord so that it could pass underneath, casually. When I returned to my parents room, I posed a request for hors d'oeurves. Mom said, "Sure we have some eggs." What she presented to me was clearly a pile of salt rocks.

(Returning from (fortunately) temporary dreamer's block, coinciding with my recent Mardi Gras obligations.)

I found a young, blonde boy of about 8 hiding behind the opened door of my fictional bedroom. He said that he had just had a heart attack. Without asking where he lived or who his parents were, I tucked him into my bed, put on a movie, and left the room to ask my friend if 8 year olds can have heart attacks. Later, my mom came by to take me for a ride. She drove (somehow) a plastic mini car wagon, and with my sister already seated behind her, I sat in the back, on top with my arms around her for safety.