Two iterations of the same dream, today, both about the ancestral hearth by the highway.
The house built & moved to the county line by teams of horses, back when Anniston changed from being 'Anne's Town'. My great-grandfather was raised in that house, and he brought his own kids up there. After my parents tried & failed to escape Alabama by moving to Indiana-- never got an explanation for that one --they came right back to the heart of their misery on the outskirts of Anniston. So that was where I was raised, with a hand at my throat and a belt on my back, in a house that was once property of a klan member. As a kid I claimed to have seen great-granddad's ghost in the hallway. (I'm fairly certain that was a lie. I would remember a ghost. Any ghost.) I don't dream about the house often. The last time I saw it intact, a hobo had broken in and established his bedroll where my parents' bedroom had been; he'd used cheap pornography to spark a fire which charred a skull-sized hole clean through the century-old hardwood floor. The place has been bulldozed in the decades since.
Anyway, the dreams were these:
[1] Living with Sig, financially stranded in Alabama, homesteading in the abandoned remains of the campo sancto. His hair's bleached, badly, and he looks perfectly miserable here. I was trying to figure out how to bridge a treacherous gap in the front porch when I heard him cry out. Raced to the kitchen to discover him on the verge of tears, his glasses broken and us too poor to replace them. The look on his face sunders my heart, and the shock sends me halfway up for air, to consciousness, where I strain, eyes open, to focus on my lover's features on the pillow beside me. But I can't, because sleep paralysis, so what I see never coheres into anything more sensible than a riot of improperly configured flesh, and the vision appalls me so that I begin groaning & shouting for help. Sig shakes me, trying to wake me...
[2] But I am not shaken free of the trap of memory, and so I am again lost in trying to reconfigure the space. The players have changed-- forgotten faces, none quite as sober as I --but the problems are little different; the kitchen has to be rearranged, the stove needs to be moved, but the floors aren't load bearing and the fixtures are all too fuckin' fixed for me to shift appliances from where they're stationed. I'm in tears trying to figure it all out, even though the problems are mundane as hell. The sleep paralysis doesn't set in this time and I wake normally. I lay there, blinking through the minutes spent thinking about nothing real, and turn to make sure I'm seeing Siegfried's face as it should be. Sensing I'm conscious his eyes shift beneath his lids and he opens them on me. "What was the nightmare," he asks, and I try not to answer. "Sorry my head's a such a damned haunted house."
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