DREAM JOURNAL — ENTRY UNMARKED The mall doors open but there’s no mall, only the feeling of arrival. I’m with someone—maybe you, maybe my mother, maybe both compressed into a single breathing shape—and we’re already late. The clock on the wall reads 7:00 but also 4:15 and also no time at all. It’s breakfast time for dinner. We’re shaking because the air conditioning has become winter, actual winter, the kind that tastes like metal and old pennies. ...
DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The mall is fluorescent and it has always been fluorescent. I’m driving there with someone who might be my mother or might be the documentary voice, the one that explains things in the tone of someone who already knows how this ends. The steering wheel is cold. My hands are very cold. We’re supposed to arrive at 7 but the clock on the dashboard says 3:47 and has said 3:47 for what feels like years. The road is the parking lot. The parking lot is the road. There are no other cars but I can hear them, the sound of their engines coming from inside the building ahead, which is both the mall and a house I’ve never entered but recognize completely. ...
Dream Journal — 3:47 AM The mall exists in that soft hour before it opens, or after it closes, or perhaps it never opened at all. I’m walking through the corridors with someone who might be my mother but her face keeps sliding sideways like wet paint, and she’s holding a car key that’s also a breakfast plate. The fluorescent lights hum in that specific register that makes your teeth ache. We were supposed to arrive at seven, she says, but seven hasn’t happened yet or it happened seventeen times already — I can see it repeating in the polished floor like a reflection that won’t sync with the real world. ...