In a Dream

In those days the earth was a lot smaller. I tried to walk all the way home, once, by going in the opposite direction, but when I didn't make it home for dinner my dad tracked me down and I got a beating right there in front of Mr. Strubbe and his cock-eyed kid. We knew everybody on the planet, in those days, which made it really difficult to hide things from my dad. You had to hide things from him, though, because he was such a crab back then. When he caught me and my brother, Rupilee, pissing on one of the glaciers he nearly had a fit. I couldn't sit down for two days. The world was a dangerous place, I suppose, but I grew up dodging hail stones as big as my head and could jump over a fifteen foot crevice in the ice. And then it got cold. Really cold. I didn't really get time, back then, but I swear it must have been cold for about a million years. I just kept my mouth shut, though, because my mother would invariably tell me to put on a sweater if I complained about it.

My favorite place to go when the world was bugging me, which it seemed to do just about every day, was the Naarq Keil, which was a huge basin carved out by a meteor along time ago. Now it looks like a dump, which it is, but when I was a kid it looked like a porcelain soup bowl with broccoli floating in it. I would sit on the edge and dangle my feet and imagine that I was a giant just home for lunch from the factory. Now that I think of it, though, I don't really like broccoli, so I probably would have just spit it out. If I had some time I'd find an old piece of scrap and slide all the way to the bottom. It took forever to get back up but it was worth it. The hill was so steep I probably got up to about a hundred miles an hour on the way down.

Since Rupilee died I don't get to go to the Keil too much. I have to help my dad with the day-to-days, and besides, he never lets me out of his sight. Sometimes I dream about lying under the trees, looking up at the veins in the sky and I wake up crying and I don't know why.