"What is this from? Is this mine?"
"You'd know better than I would, hon." She stops organizing my cheap costume jewelry on display beneath the counter. "You think real hard now; it'll come to you."
I'm blank. I set it down on the counter, looking over at her.
"Guess I won't be buying this today."
"Well now; that's a real shame." She frowns at me.
Then I wake up.
When you are arrested by remembering yourself in a place all blanched out with that nondescript transitional vacuum ruthlessly left in place upon your psyche's timeline, when you wander into that void, you somehow run into yourself. Sure the foyer all bus-stop white might be nondescript, and you might just be already talking to your twin, but you would never know—save for some holy trigger that somehow works its nefarious claws deep down to pull that tendon towards the triangle hammer. Reflexively yourself. I'm covered in damp; I didn't find this at all, and I feel hollowed out beneath my bed spread, emptied of the stuff inside that keeps me from imploding all anxious, white noise, panic.
So most times in my dreams it's sort of awful. I'll be in the middle of a field of brown dying crops completely bowing to drought and a wind that unhinges my body from the earth upwards in a manner terrifying. Because it's a tornado, and there are two choices of shelter in this dusty field: a metal skeleton of bedsprings indicating the shadow of a twin, or a dilapidated shack to my left. The shack has three stories but it's like a one-room structure; you see the sunset between the boards at dusk—it's that translucently fucked. And there are two identical ramshackle twin structures stacked vertically on that shaky, shifty, sky-slanted base, and I would go there if I realized I was dreaming. If I realized I was not in waking life, I would run and climb up the decaying porch boards dodging the tetanus nails and cross over that threshold of a front screen door whose top hinge is the only one attached to the frame-screen rouge with rust and house creaked up with dirt dobbers clogging all the framing angles, shutters, siding joints.
But in this field, with these two options of a triple-stacked shack and a rusted bed skeleton, I always go for the twin metal bed springs and Katy is with me, and I am the grown-up aunt, and we are crunching down all the veiny green scales of crops. The wind overpowers any sound beyond two feet, so it's crunching like leaves and howling like trains, and I am leading my niece to a skeleton bedspring for shelter. She follows willingly.
GRANNY YODELING
© 2013 Works & Days Quarterly and Jodi Page Corley