Since You are Gone: I Dreamed You Laughing
Dream One, 2019 - Torrents. Mudding the hill around your stuccoed home. Rain dream of unknown towns. Your suburb. Never entered. No reason to go there. Ever. Gray, swamp green, and water washing and spraying its warnings. No baptism. No redemption. No cleansing. What kind of girl are you if you are, indeed a girl, to live here in this doomed place? Rain. Glooming the swamp with no stops. Doors closing everywhere and biblical rushing rain in eyes, ears, and lungs. Floating muggy and without body in the downpour as clay cascades down your hill. Hovering above the snake, its blacking skin twisting, then slipping invisible into its hole near your window. We had just met.
Dream Two - Hovering weightless above the faceless man’s bald spot in the room’s whiting. Skin like a peach sun poking through thinning pubic hair, his pudgy flesh stretched over a once-muscled frame. Don’t open the doors, sir, but of course he does. Or they release themselves like bleached eyes when the night arrives. Yes, the cabinets holy, white, and inviting, open themselves. Inside a fat black snake, human-female size, as if roped inside with hands tied behind, a shiny wiggling, a damsel on a railroad track without a railroad track. The snake, for certain, is a she and he is standing in the stillness of my dream in the shock of white. Then I’m gone.
Dream Three, March 2021 - I am traveling, in England, perhaps, or India, or both. My luggage is late, just as it was in Manchester, when Max told me they couldn’t have lost it. Waiting as empty conveyers chatter and silver their disappointment, but then the snake arrives, thick and black, and wiggling. The size of a woman, a particular woman I have known but never have met. The snake scaling my dreams. I imagined her laughing as she lay there, bare and wet on the track.
Dream Four - I rush to my luggage which is trapped in a conveyer. Max is nowhere and I’m panicked. Must act fast. My wallet slips from my grip into the conveyer, but when I reach to pick it up, there are writhing bundles of snakes cascading from a log riddled with holes. The conveyer clanks and moves. I plead with a worker to help me get my wallet which has vanished. He smiles and proceeds down a corridor.
June, 2021 - Heat. Inertia. The yard that overcomes. Thigh-high grass. The smell of gasoline. I am mowing, finally, and sadly, killed some things. The whipped weeds and seeds of dandelions. Milkweed stalks who didn’t need me. Then the snake, caught in the blade, slung to the gravel bed near the house.
July, 2021 - Fumbling with the keys to the shed. I’ll master the grass and keep the snakes away. But they love to sun on the warm wood. And they are patient, can wait all day for their prey. I open the doors and the tiny snake coils near my feet, then races into the shed. Two weeks later, same thing. The snake spiraled in the meeting of two swinging doors, inert in the summer heat, but ready.
Koss is a queer writer and artist from the MidWest. Find their work in Diode Poetry, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Prelude, Best Small Fictions, and many others. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular. Her website is http://koss-works.com.
