Dreamscapes: It’s Hard Out Here for a Wolf (Part 2)
I am back in my childhood home yet again, and I really need to leave and go back to the desert. I don’t tell my mother because I know she won’t understand. She drives me to a nail polish store. I enter the store, leaving her in the car, and inside the building I look for doors she can’t see from the car. I enter a backroom with children’s books in it. There are some doors that are smaller than me, and I wonder who on earth they are for. I exit out a side door, and my mother sees me and begins to yell, but the owner of the shop shoves a bag of things I bought for her into her hands and tells her, “She has to get back to the desert! Let her go!” Then I am flying through the city and into another rural (but slightly less) town.
I am walking as a wolf on this path by a lake, and I see a man coming down from a distance, so I turn into a human and say hello as I pass him. About a minute after I pass him I turn back into a wolf, and I realize I am hungry. I see some squirrels and I catch one and I eat it. Then a darker squirrel jumps onto my neck, but I realize that this is my new squirrel friend.
I walk down to the center of this little town as a human, and I see large grey and green hills spread out across a misty body of water. They look drier and more desert-like, and I decide that’s the right way to go. I ask a man who is mowing his lawn if there are any places to rent a boat, but then I realize the logistics of it wouldn’t work out, and also somehow, I suddenly have a floaty foam board with paddles, so I say thank you, and begin to paddle across with water with the squirrel still on my neck.
When I finally make it to a land mass, I realize that the tides will cover most of it soon. It is nighttime, and I must sleep. I usually sleep in my wolf form as it is much safer than sleeping as a woman, but I see two rocking chairs and a pack of cigarettes on the patch of land, and I think that maybe whoever they belong to will come back, so I stay a human. I put the foam floaty on the land and lie on it like a bed. The squirrel crawls into my arms for a moment, but then back out, and as it gets close to the water, it suddenly turns into a little girl. I say, “How did you do that??” and she responds, “I don’t know!” But now I have a little girl to take care of instead of a squirrel.
We try to sleep, but the water is covering more and more of the land and both rocking chairs are in the water, and suddenly these two women in prom dresses swim over and say, “We have to go, the water is going to swamp this whole landmass in a minute!” One of the women throws my laptop in the water, but I retrieve it. Then they take us to their house, which has many children and a mother in it. Scattered all over the floor are pieces of a plastic dessert food set that is somehow evil, and we have to keep stomping on them and I stab them with a sword to make them go away. We finally defeat them all.
I tell the little girl we have to go, and she grabs a strange-shaped sandwich container, and says, “I want this,” and I tell her, “No,” because it is not hers and I think it is too big for her, but then I realize that she is just a little girl and she doesn’t understand all that, and her life is tumultuous enough, so I just let her have it. I tell her we should get her a backpack soon. Then we leave.
Then we are at another house with children in it, and they are rowdier than the first group. A young man blows out a vape cloud. The girl is playing with the other children and she is having so much fun. I realize I can’t take her with me all the way to the desert. She’s just a little girl who deserves a normal, happy life. I decide to leave her there with this family. I try to say good-bye, and she keeps running around in the way that children do when they are having fun and don’t want to say good-bye. But I say, “I’m leaving FOREVER” and I grab the toys from her hand and make her hug me, because it is the last time in our lives I will ever see her.
Then I leave, to make my way to the desert.Monadnock Underground