Dream

Driving down Campbell Avenue in my Dad’s van. I’m lying down in the back bed but I’m a girl. Campbell Avenue is wildly overgrown and trees hang over the road. I look to see if Eureka House is still there, and it is, but it’s hidden from view. The words Bar and Restaurant are lit up in red.

We turn onto Route 59 and swing right into the bank parking lot. My father gets out and goes to the ATM. Three guys are walking back to their car. They have long greasy hair. As my father returns to the driver’s side door, one of the guys turns to him, a large curved blade in his hands. He falls into the van on top of my father and I close my eyes.

I feel the man breathing over me and I silently beg him not to kill me. Then I feel the tip of a knife blade on my hand. I hold back sound as it pierces my skin. He begins to carve bloody patterns into me.

Then I’m at his house and it’s not the same guy. This one is younger, and there are kids around. They’re crass and loud. I’m his slave and he’s teaching me how to obey, how to kneel and how to turn my face to the ground.

Outside, I hear one of the boys complain and a man says how’d you like to be fucked up the ass?

Then I’m in a public square on Division Street in a wagon with other girls. We\’re being forced to kneel on gravel on the wooden planks and our heads are down. The guys with us aren’t my guys. They poke their heads into the wagon and bark orders at us. I can feel them staring at me in particular.

Then I’m walking down Division Street with the wagons behind me. I enter a doorway and climb steep stone stairs into a high open and tropical space with waterfalls and slides. Showerheads are mounted into the rocks. I realize I desperately want a shower. I walk along the edge and the path gets narrower and narrower. I look down a slide which ends in a little pool but it’s made of rock and looks entirely vertical and terrifying. I wonder if I have to pay to shower and can’t remember if there was anybody in the lobby. Then I see a woman behind a counter half a level below me and another woman paying her. I try to scoot out of her sight but there isn’t anyone else there and there is no place to hide. I quickly shower and go back downstairs, briskly walking past the woman in the lobby and out into the street.

I head back to my childhood home. My parents, or maybe my mother, is asleep in her bed but the bedroom is smaller and in a different arrangement. I go into her bathroom. Through the wall, I can hear the other side of the apartment, where the family of guys who killed my father at the bank are living. I think how nice it is that my parents let them live there with us and how lucky I am to be alive.

But is he my boyfriend? Suddenly I don’t remember the attack, and a whole other backstory comes into my head. Then I remember. But I don’t know which story is true.