presidential dreaming

That afternoon I dreamt of my sisters, and Steve, and the boy. They were disparate faces among faces in a big crowd I was roving through. The crowd, dressed in old-fashioned formal and military garb, must’ve been gathered at a cemetery because I remembered gravestones when I woke up: Kitzmiller, Young, Koch rang out inside me as if some previously unsummoned voice was reciting them, a voice different, in a way I couldn’t explain, to the one that usually read the lines of books back to me. I remembered trying to flake the hard lichen off of the gravestones and cutting the skin under my fingernails. I remembered pathetically broken, dirty footwear, and paths of flattened grass that should've been brown but were so green as to look aglow. Broad fields surrounded the cemetery, and further into the distance, long nuggetty mountains covered with trees that looked like the high country around Bulla and Sterling, only I knew it wasn’t that high country but somewhere a long way away. The mountains were dim and the sky was very blue and very still, as though a great cold had set in, or was about to. It felt, upon reflection, as if the sea had been nearby. As I dreamt I was close enough to the surface of consciousness to feel my body twitching.

Although he was the same height as the other men, the boy’s face was still a boy’s. His outfit, I was fairly certain, was that of a solider. He had the same expression as he did when I saw him, and his head was tilted back, and he looked even ghastlier in the company of all those heads so solemnly bowed. My sisters were also dressed as soldiers; their long hair hidden under little infantrymen’s caps, their tits hidden under heavy overcoats I couldn’t remember the colour of. The exception was Aminath; a Playboy bunny sized chest, the absolute opposite of her chest in real life, bulged out and grazed the back of the man in front of her, Abraham Lincoln, who looked as if he was about to keel over and die. Lincoln was repeatedly mouthing something indecipherable to himself. My sisters weren’t standing together. Their heads were bowed. I wasn’t even sure they looked especially like my sisters, only that they were. Bawdy music rang out, although I couldn’t remember a band, and at the front of the assembly there was a sort of dedicatory platform, which Steve was either standing on or right beside. Clearly, something important was about to happen, or had happened already, or was in the act of happening. Meanwhile, the boy seemed to be shifting positions as I was, but more radically. In the middle of the audience at first, my memory placed him alternately at the very front and very back, then at either flank, and at some point he was even standing in the middle of one of the broad fields, miles from everybody. I remember my vision being unaffected by the jolt of footsteps, as if I was floating like a camera on a wire. During dinner I suddenly pictured the boy perched birdlike on top of a bluestone mausoleum, a mausoleum I was sure hadn’t been in the dream but which just as surely I’d laid eyes on somewhere, sometime.