thedarksiren2 | dream #__

I was in an old, abandoned house, younger than I am now. Perhaps I was a teen for a moment, but the next moment I was just 8 or 9. The floorboards creaked without feet standing on them, and I sat on the attic floor playin with dolls, only I was a marionette.

I heard Billy calling to me, "Dawn Ellen!" I moved stop-motion like, dropping dolls and my clothing changing to dirty, dank white gowns. I stood & stretched, growing with every moment I reached for the sky. I shook my body like a dog just out of water, and the gowns fell like dust, revealing jeans and a Jem! t-shirt; I was a teen with punk-rock hair in rainbows.

I walked toward the stairwell, a left from where I'd been facing before. And the sunlight that had been lighting the room was fading quickly. I was annoyed by this, and when I turned past the old splintered banister, I found that the stairs were further rotted than I remembered them when I came inside the house to play. I sighed, rolling my eyes and stepped over the top stair to the second, which was a bit more stable.

The house seemed to be groaning at me in whispers as I made my way down the stairs, across the main floor and to the door. I walked outside, and got chills up my spine as a roar came racing toward my backside, my feet still going down the stairs of the front porch. The door closed before the roar could escape the house though, slamming, leaving a whimper to caress my ears. I found myself running forward, into tall yellow grass that might have been corn stalks for a minute. A boy jumped out at me as if he meant to scare me, but didn't mean anything at all too. He asked me if I saw "it." I shrugged, rolling my eyes again, and turned right to go to my house, pushing the grass aside and thinking I should get a papercut, but it would be a grass-cut, I supposed. This made me laugh a little, and the boy jumped up from a crouching position ten feet behind me, racing to catch up.

I stood just to the side of my house, an old rickety house in podunk somewhere. There were old cars and bicycles torn apart in the garage on the other side of the house, but I was more intent on watching the southern sunset, filled with hues of most amazing purples and reds. I crossed my arms to warm myself, rubbing my hands up and down my biceps; it had been like the house next door needed me, hungered for the love that could only come from my heart and hands. I was suddenly 29 again, and very weary. I remember thinking that the red in the sky was surely the house's broken heart, bleeding, and swore I could hear it sobbing in the distance with the sunset.

A hand landed on my right shoulder; Jim Love said, "Come on, we got shit to do," a cigarette flopping about on his lower lip, garbling his speech. I nodded, touching his hand - it was dirty black-ice, soot from LTV or wherever he worked tainting the air I breathed. I began coughing as I turned to follow him east.

We seemed to initially walk into the grass, and it turned to corn again. Then it disappeared and we were walking through a parking lot toward a truck that might have been my ex's pickup. I refused to believe this, however, and ran to catch up with Jim.

He had a Jimmy and opened the door. The truck howled, and I remember wondering whether a Hummer hummed when it was broken into. I didn't say it out loud, but JIm turned to scowl at me, and then smiled his dirty-toothed smile, wiggling his eyebrows. "Ready?" he asked. I nodded, and climbed into the truck that had suddenly grown into a larger version, the cleanest white I'd ever seen.

I could feel a man somewhere struggling with my taking his truck, but he wasn't really there, so I shrugged it off, turned the key and began to drive.

Next moment, I was parking behind

bindrune on a suburban street in Oroville CA, her white car quietly resting before my stolen truck. Families watched and put their arms around their children as we got out of our vehicles. A few mothers turned their kids bodies toward their homes, gently urging them inside. I shrugged this off as typical motherly behavior, and slammed the beastly truck door with a loud, echoing VWWHOOM!

We walked westward down the street to a sidewalk when we heard something. We stood on the sidewalk in terror as we watched several cop cars gliding by our stolen vehicles, giving a small bleep of their sirens to let everyone know they had arrived.

We stood on a corner, pretending like we'd been there for a while. I began smoking, which was very strange to me since I knew I didn't smoke. It fit the disguise, however, and tasted like tea.

"I guess I shoulda taken those combat boots out,huh?" I asked

bindrune. She nodded, taking a drag off her own cigarette. "Did you leave anything important or noticeable in your car?"

She nodded, "yeah, my favorite shoes are on the floor in the front."

"Bummer."

"yeah."

It seemed like hours passed; the cops used their monster mag-lights to look inside the vehicles, but never found anything incriminating. One of the worrisome mothers came out of her house with a pink dress on that resembled Mrs. Cleaver's typical wardrobe in Leave it to Beaver. I giggled at her outfit, and thought it was pink but it turned to black and white before I could make fun of it to

bindrune. She knew though, and we both laughed as we watched the cop tear her up for calling them for "no good reason."

They drove away, and somehow we agreed to ride in the truck together from this point on. We climbed in quickly, and I began driving down side-streets that resembled other parts of CA, but certainly not Oroville. I eventually made it to one of my old neighborhood streets, and stopped to put some information into this map-like machine above the dashboard. It was oval-shaped and hollow-looking. But when I touched the black, seemingly vacant air in front of it, a screen lit up. I typed in where we needed to go: 3570 Glenn Ave. This was my childhood address, and I wanted to play in my willow tree again.

It gave us directions, and as I drove up the street,

bindrune telling me to turn and see Table Mountain behind us, I woke up.