Food

Anne-Michèle was living in my house. She liked to have people over for dinner and she liked to play Scrabble with my dad. One day she told me that one of her regular dinner guests was a hermaphrodite and that he had gotten her pregnant even though she already had a girlfriend. She asked me to adopt her baby, and I wanted to, but I was unemployed so I thought it would be better for her to keep the baby. She got upset and went upstairs to be alone. I thought an A Beautiful Lotus concert might make her feel better so I went upstairs to invite her. She wasn’t in her room so I ran back downstairs to see if she was outside. There was a guy getting ready to drive away in his car so I banged on the door and screamed “Where is she‽” He said she was “in the back” so I screamed and banged on the trunk until she opened it and got out.

I went to a hockey game at the Pepsi Center. There were two ice rinks separated by nets and players could skate from one to the other. The Avalanche goaltender kept trying to score in the goal behind his own. The game ended and my stepmom asked me to buy a small whiteboard on my way home, I think she wanted to use it to keep track of mammography appointments. My parents and I went home in three separate cars. Our house was in Japan so my car turned into the Millennium Falcon so I could cross the Pacific Ocean. A giant Buddha statue was also crossing the Pacific but it exploded when it neared the Japanese shoreline. The dream became animated and the Japanese Emperor, who had African ancestry, was very sad about the destruction of the Buddha statue. The Emperor was heating tacos in the microwave when a masked assassin entered the room. The tacos got too hot and became the consistency of giant microwaved marshmallows and made a big mess on the floor. The animated part of the dream ended and the three of us were back home and I had forgotten to get a whiteboard. My bedroom was on one of the upper floors and I decided to sneak out of the window and onto the roof. I sang an Anberlin song as I was climbing down the roof and jumping off: Take what you want from me, it means nothing now. Take everything from me, it means nothing now. Not so easy to forgive, harder to forget, take what you want. I landed in wet grass and started crawling with my stomach close to the ground so nobody could see me. My dad came out of the house and asked me if I wanted to go to the grocery store with him. My stepmom told me to “get the breast cancer test with the cup” instead of the whiteboard. There was also something about my mom working at a movie theater in Hollywood with hundreds of screens.

There were three sets of washers and dryers in the basement and I was doing laundry. It was about 3:00 in the morning and everyone else was asleep. I went back up to the ground floor and my grandmother was sitting at the dining room table. She did not look very healthy. She said she came to visit because she feared her time was short. Then the rest of the family showed up and everyone was eating kosher salami sandwiches.

Part One

We were having Thanksgiving dinner and I was trying to fix a flimsy rack that was hanging from the ceiling. Sandy’s mother made the rack a long time ago. Our guests were a group of middle-aged women. We watched a video about them after they left. It was a video about how they survived flooding in Chaco Canyon.

Part Two

I was walking in a park with my mom and we saw a large tent where dogs were being adopted.

I was walking around Paris with Teena and we met her fiancé in an underground restaurant with a glass roof. The three of us ate together and I kept quiet during their conversation. They picked an ‘80s power ballad to sing to each other at the wedding. They also decided to circumcise any and all of their future sons.