Impressions

Is this a graduation party? Wow, it's in a pool. Everyone crowd onto this boat, it's time to go.

Enter: green, murky, shallow swamp. What's this, a wagon train of canoes? Where are we going? Oh look, a snake. How cute. No, don't get out to catch it. Oh well, at least the water's not that deep. Holy shit, get back in the boat! THAT one's humongous! Look!... wow ... look how it swims in a spiral... I'm pretty sure snakes that big don't grow well in water this shallow.

Ah, back at port. Hey, look, another group of people. Wait - that's - that's us! No, no, stay back. Look, they're going in the buiding. We can watch them from this overhang here. Damn, we're trapped in some sort of time flux. How do we get out? No, we can't ask our past selves! That'd completely screw up the space-time continuum! What are you thinking?



Wow, this place is really kind of dark. But look at all these fish and reptiles and such! No, sorry, I don't work here. Hey, Kevin, nice store. Boy, it sure is dank.



Maybe if... if I angle my way across the lawn here they won't notice I'm gone... no, they're telling me to get back in line. Dang, college campuses are too open. These people seem nice enough, but I can tell they've got something nasty planned for us.

What? I'm a finalist in some stupid talent competition? Fine. I don't know about the rest of you, but my goal is to not win. Oh? My turn? Well, I was already up here. I can't really turn back now.
What is a ball to a puppy?
Is this some sort of analogy test? No, wait. That's simple... a toy. That's right, I'm supposed to be trying to win. Now maybe if I kneel down amidst these small children and look introspective I can gain get some of the audience to like me. Let me study this book. Here.

Well, now that that's over with I can- wait, what? we have to go to kyra's musical? Dang it, I thought I was finally free to do what I wanted. What, we're ALL in it? Um, okay. Let's get in this capsule-shaped thing and drive there.

Okay, I guess I'll get in costume and pretend I know what I'm doing. I hope Mrs. L.H. isn't mad at me for not coming to any rehearsals. Kellen seems to have a decent idea of what's going on, I'll follow her. Whew. This is ridiculous, but it's not that bad.







I like this house. Some of you should stay outside.

It's got to be here, it absolutely has to be here... I'm sure I left it here in the other dimension... quick, the wind is picking up, we have to find it before the universe collapses. Try turning on and off all the lights and here, hold this. Shit. Electricity's gone out.
No, no, I know it was here... goddamnit!
I know this is where I left it!
I know, I know, it's time to go,
running out of time
but
I know it's here

The Cold

Word spreads quickly through the crowd that there is going to be a fire tonight. Everyone in the parking lot speaks in hushed whispers, shivering in the cold antarctic night and wondering whether they should obey the hotel staff's instructions and go back to their rooms until it is time to evacuate. I decide I will go back to my room and pack up my things, and put on some warmer clothes so I won't freeze to death after the evacuation.
Up on the tenth floor I sit on the edge of the bed next to my suitcase, waiting for the phone call. Impatiently, I get up and look out the window to the parking lot and swimming pools below. I can just make out small specks of light from the lanterns of the nervous guests who refused to go back to their rooms.
I hear movement at the door- that must be him- the arsonist. I dash over and fling the door open, but he is gone; I just catch the last echoes of his laugh. I will beat him out of the hotel. My little sister and I take after him, alternating between flying and skating down the spiral ramps and staircases. The hotel has an old feel, though it has been recently renovated, reminiscent of the hotel from The Shining. The arsonist has taken the elevator, which is a stupid thing when there is about to be a fire. As we make our way to the ground floor we seem to switch roles several times from pursuing and being pursued- all I know is the rush of fear and excitement that means I will win.

In the parking lot I squint through the darkness, trying to discern my group of friends from the rest of the crowd. I determine I've got the right group, and out my arms around their shoulders, and turn my head back to the building- I can, now that I'm safe. Every window is dark, with the curtains open, and no sign of flame. I am surprised that everyone actually remembered the fire drill instructions from elementary school, forming a line and the last person out turning off the light. Still gazing at the building I say, "It's good that everyone made it out alright." I can hardly hear my own voice over the whistling wind.

At home, I prepare to go to an outdoor, middle-of-the-night dance. Our house feels huge and empty, and while it is well-lit, the darkness and cold press in. My mom is especially excited for me, running around with the camera like it's prom. She wants me to look nice, but I just want to be warm. I can't seem to find enough clothes, because I left most of them at home, not expecting to go to some crazy dance. I gather it will involve some freeform skiing and dancing in a snow-covered water park-type setting, and I remind my mother, "You know I haven't skied in years. How am I suppposed to stand upright, let alone spin around in circles with someone while sliding downhill?" She says, "Prepare for lots of bruises!" My friends wait at the door, all ready to go. At the last minute I decide I can't wear a windbreaker to a formal dance, and my shoes don't match my outfit.

I stand just below that exit ramp coming off of the West Seattle Brigde onto 99 that curves so sharply that you always end up squished next to the person next to you on the 120 to downtown. Part of it has disconnected, so that the ramp does not meet the freeway. Kris is up there on his bicycle, perched on the edge of the freeway, doing some odd maneuvers as a part of race. I wonder why he would do something like that to his bike. In a few seconds he is done and comes down to the basement of my house, located just under the ramp. We gather in the laundry room with Beth and Kellen. My mom bustles around doing laundry, she immediately gets them all engaged reading old Balderdash responses. Kris also shows them his latest project: his front wheel that he has begun threading with fine silver wire. It looks more like a sculpture, with an uneven web that bends the flimsy gold-foiled frame.
Determined to finally give Kris back his shirt, I tap him on the shoulder, but alas, I don't have the shirt with me. I do, however, tell him that I have something else from my dad that he might be interested in. I squeeze past my mom to get to a giant spool on the table and pull off a few pieces of the thick wire. I show Kris and his face lights up. "Copper wire!" he exclaims, as if it was just the breakthrough he needed to make the piece complete.
We all squeeze on to the piano bench and play fragments of pieces we remember from our childhood lessons.

That wasn't supposed to happen

Kathryn and I are working at Solstice, and we are keeping the cafe open late for a show of some sort. I feel alright about this until we try to use the cash register and the "3", "00", and "cash" keys are broken off. In a panic, I try to get the espresso machine mechanic to come back and fix it, but he has already left. When I turn back, someone has started a list of everything sold and convinces me it will be alright. Matt, A-Strike, Jacob, Eva, and some other band members approach, and I greet them warmly. Later, they are over talking to Devin, who I think is also helping with the event, and I overhear A-Strike say, "Yeah, and I keep getting these e-mails from the dream blog- we all have, since our names were first mentioned it put us on its e-mail list and won't stop sending us updates!"
I can feel my cheeks burning.I say, "No... not all of you?"
A-Strike says, "Yeah, we're all on the list now!"
Shit! I just had a dream about making out with Matt. I turn to him, and he looks at me for a second before turning away in embarrassment. I ask, "Matt, can we talk outside for a minute?" He nods, and we step out into the alley. I say, "I'm really sorry, Matt, that shouldn't have been something you had to read."
He says, "No! Look, it's okay, don't worry about it Jenny!" much in the way Kris said I shouldn't worry about being a jerk.
I continue, "I just think, well, it wouldn't even have been weird if Andrew hadn't mentioned it and-"
"Exactly!" He cuts in enthusiastically, and says, "Good, I'm glad we're clear on that!" and he hugs me, and we both get a little too intimate.

I am on an a hike with a group of classmates, including my secret lover, and a teacher. We reach vantage point on a steep cliff, overlooking the sun setting on the ocean. Everyone begins to move down the steep path to the beach, and I quickly try to find a way to indicate to my lover that we should stay behind. Just as the last student rounds the bend, I turn around, and almost stumble over a body lying face down on the ground. I gasp in shock and then decide the man is probably taking a nap. I shake his shoulder and say loudly, "SIR, ARE YOU ALRIGHT?" several times, before backing off and realizing I probably shouldn't touch the body. I do spot a wallet nearby and pick it up. I pull out photos of a man, who I presume is the body, although I can't see his face. The name on the credit card says "Wilder". I yell to my brother, who appears at my side. "Nick! Do you recognize the man in this picture? You had Mr. Wilder for English in high school, didn't you? Is this him?"
Nick nods.

I find myself suddenly underwater, unsure of which way is up. There is too much pressure and I need to get to the surface. I do i somersault, looking for the sun, but there are odd glints of light in the dark water in every direction. Suddenly there is a powerful rushing, something shooting up beneath me from great depths. A giant iron capsule nearly slams into me as it rushes to the surface.
I get a flash of the future: the scariest mutant sharks I can imagine are thrashing around in the water around me, having been released from the capsule when the chain anchoring their isolation chamber to the floor of the ocean snapped-
I am underwater still but there is no sign of the capsule or the sharks. This time I notice a chain leading down into the depths and I understand it leads from the capsule at the bottom to a buoy on the surface. I immediately start swimming to to the surface, knowing I have to get away before-
The capsule explodes from the water near me and shoots into the sky. I frantically swim towards the same cliffs I stood on before with the body of Mr. Wilder, hoping I can get away before the capsule falls from the sky and the sharks are released.
Now I am with someone, a friend, possibly my lover from before. We are still about a hundred yards from the base of the cliff, but we can see the bottom is not more than twenty feet away. We hear yelling from the cliff- we are saved!
But then we get a better look- the figures line up, each one carrying a large stone over his head. One by one they throw the stones, and all I can do it sit there and think, "Are they really throwing stones at us?" until one nearly hits me over the head and I have to dive underwater.

I examine several packages of macaroni from the cupboard, reading the instructions and trying to decide which one to prepare. They all have strange complex instructions, though, such as, "At 4900 feet, boil 10 quarts water for 30 seconds, then remove half, saving one cup for later use. Add half package of macaroni..."

I walk across campus, soaking wet, giving a tour to the same group that was at Solstice earlier, now also including Anna, Kellen, and Alex. We arrive at Red Square... but it is white. I assume it is ice- they must have removed red square, installed a lake, and it froze over. Kathryn suggests, "Let's go swimming!" Everyone agrees, the weather is as nice as can be (cloudy), and starts removing their shoes.
I am the first one ready, running backwards as fast as I can with my elbows out behind me to break through the ice. Alex and Kathryn are close behind. When I reach the "shoreline" and throw myself backwards, however, I do not crash through ice. I get tangled up in the white butcher paper that is actually covering the lake, and my feet get stuck, in what I fear is mud.
"Stop!" I yell, "You're going to get covered in mud!" Alex is already in, though, and he explains that the bottom is paved, with stairs leading down from the edges.
A campus police officer blows a whistle and walks up to us across the butcher paper surface of the lake, explaining to me as I sit tangled in the soggy paper that Alex is right: red square is actually a paved pool, but it is closed for the winter. We thank her and crawl out of the pool, moving into the lobby of a small art gallery to wring ourselves out.

My Houses

My parents are on vacation, and the babysitter has plotted to let some burglars into our house, who will kidnap me and my twin brother. I hear her talking to the men as she lets them into the house, so I run upstairs to hide while my brother runs to the basement. I think they capture him, but I climb out of the upstairs window and run though my neighbor's backward in my pink nightgown. I ring their doorbell frantically, but the men pull up in the driveway. I sprint across the street to my other neighbor's house, yelling, hoping someone in the neighborhood will hear me. As I run up to the door a man opens it and I run inside. With a chill, I realize the man is not my neighbor, but a cohort of the crooks.

I crouch in the my neighbor's kitchen, which is now much older with a wood stove and dirty pink linoleum floors. I know it is useless hiding here.

My parents hug me and as we walk back to (not) our house. They press the garage door opener and the walls roll up, revealing a gigantic well-stocked beverage refrigerator, like the kind in the grocery store where the shelves are tilted so the bottles slide forward. My sister lounges on top of the bottles on the top shelf, a little cramped under the roof of the machine. She welcomes me back and casually asks if I am going to stay away for a while this time. I hadn't thought of that, but now I remember that sometimes after an Ordeal, children will stay away from home for a while, having earned a vacation. This sounds like an excellent idea to me, so I climb up into the refrigerator, the heels of my striped Fluevogs slipping on the plastic bottle caps, wedge myself underneath a ceiling beam and into the other side of the refrigerator, and slide down and out for the house.

Kathryn and I drive along a freeway towards Canada. We approach a bridge spanning a ravine, and somehow get in the wrong lane so that we hurtle at a rapid speed down a small river in the center of the bridge, and down into a tunnel in the face of the cliff.

Somehow we survive, and pull up in the line to cross the border. The wait is going to be a long time, so we decide to get out the car and use the bathroom and a Chuck E. Cheese/cruise ship we can see on the a nearby forested hill, but I think it might be in Canada, and I worry that we won't be allowed back to the car without our birth certificates. Kathryn isn't concerned, so we continue on.
There are more people with us now, like Anna, Kellen, and Lindy, and as I wait for them outside of the bathroom, I critique the wall in front of me that I see as somehow more generic than any other wall I have seen. It is coated in plastic, and has perforated outlines where one might punch out an extra doorway of needed. I scoff at the Chuck E. Cheese/cruise line for only having used one of the five possible doorways.

We go back to the car, which is now a school bus that we live in. Somehow it is turned around facing the other direction, but everyone else is convinced that Canada is that way anyway.

It was a perfect day

The temperature is just right, the air is clear, and the light is not too bright. Looking east to the Sound, the tide is out, and I feel perfect as I am. I wish I could go down to the water, but I have obligations, so I call Alex and tell him he needs to take a break and go down there.

-

I try to go to McCarty to pick up a key to my new home, but since I got there from my dorm, in a building a minute and a half to the southwest, I cannot obtain the key, because I don't live in that dorm anymore, I live in Fremont. I have to go somewhere else to pick up the key because the person I an trying to pick up the key from would only live in McCarty if I lived in the other dorm. I try and figure out where the person with the key lives now that I live in Fremont, or if they might be in a different place altogether since I am about to move.
I lose track of my thoughts when I run into a cluster of people standing in the way of the exit. Trying to go around them, I realize it is actually a line of people, extending down the hallway and all the way up the wide wooden stair. Actually, down every hallyway and up every staircase. A rythmic flashing catches my eye, and I understand that the building is filled with students standing in line for copy machines. Each one holds about three hundred pages, and must make copies of them before going to class.
I finally find my way out of the solid maze of students and out to a parking lot. On my way out I notice that one of the boys I am walking next to looks like Vinh from my tea class, but I can't tell for sure because I don't want to interrupt his conversation. Eventually I am almost sure it is Vinh, but he is ignoring me because I never got back to him about getting chai. He gets into a sportscar in the parking lot an I walk down the line of cars, looking for Kathryn's van. When I think I've found it I hesitate, debating whether it's really white now, but Kathryn's dad rolls down the window and sticks his head out. The other doors open and Kellen and Anna get out. Then Devin and Kathryn come over from a nearby car. Kathryn's dad says they've been waiting for me to start the summer programming class. They do this every summer in this parking lot, because it's too expensive to get a classroom. This makes me really nervous, because as much as I would like to take a class with everyone, I haven't taken math in two years, and Devin is already talking about algorithms.

I go back to my dormitory, which actually looks like my Fremont Studio (no wonder I was confused), and lay on the floor, looking through the bookcase. I pick out a book titled "SURPRISES!", thinking that maybe it's full of ideas for giving people really cool surprise parties. Instead, I am disappointed to see that it includes 10-12 illustrated summaries of historically surprising engineering feats.

Chutes and Ladders

We are entering the Puyallup Fair. We have some sort of priviledged pass, but we have yet to purchase them. We are already late for the event we were hoping to attend, so we hurry up to a ticket kiosk, set somewhat apart from the others. As soon as everyone has their tickets, we are told to put them in a large metal box, much like a postbox. Someone, I don't see who, makes to deposit theirs, but as soon as they get close, the box grabs their arm and devours them. Everyone is alarmed, but the person calls from below that the landing is fine and to hurry up, we're going to miss the show. One by one, we cautiously approach the postbox and are devoured in turn. I find myself in a small metal chute, with a square of sunny cement below. I am afraid of landing wrong and injuring myself. I wedge my feet against the edges of the chute and stay there. Jenny and Alex coax me down with the reasoning that the person following me would soon crush me, and I drop to the ground, thankfully without harm. I find our small party underneath a very large space shuttle, and in the distance I can see a large crowd gathered, and I hear people cheering. After Kellen arrives, we seal the chute to deterr the FBI agents from following us, and joing the throng of cheering people

We appear to be on a road trip. Andrew is driving; Holly is in the front and I am in the back with Kellen. Suddenly she demands to stop, and is unusually snappy with us, so we decide we had better stop, even though we are running late. We pull into the parking lot of a department store, and Kellen rushes inside as Andrew and I get out to stretch our legs. It starts to rain. We see a crowd of people standing underneath a gigantic statue of an ant but it looks a bit unstable to me, so we find a picnic table underneath some trees. As we sit down, everything around us disappears, and suddenly I find it very hard to concentrate on anything Andrew is saying because I am so amazed by the infinite grass fields that surround us.
Andrew begins to tell me about some freshman girl that has taken an interest in him. Her name actually consists of five names, and I feel slightly sorry for her, and wonder what her parents were thinking. Trying to describe her, he holds his hand down to his waist: "She's about this tall." I vaguely wonder if he is crazy - she couldn't be just three feet tall - then decide that he must mean three feet taller than the picnic table. Suddenly I think of the time, and as soon as I stand up, we are back in the parking lot of the department store. I look in the glass doors and I see Kellen waiting patiently on the floating escalator that will carry her to the door. Somewhere along the way she has lost her pants and hasn't noticed, but I decide not to tell her because we would lose time while she tried to go back and get them.
Now I am in Mr. Wilder's classroom, sitting in the desk that I sat in last year. There are a few other people in the classroom, talking quietly. Wilder comes over to me and demands, "What makes you angry?" I am puzzled by his question, and he repeats it three times before I shrug and pretend to be captivated by a poster across the room. He leans down next to my face, and says quietly, "Do you get mad when the little girl on your team doesn't get enough points?" Now I am even more confused, and I slip out the other side of my desk and ask him what I can do to get out of here.
He tells me he has dropped his DVD player outside, and he wants me to go get it. I walk outside and I see it laying on the grass, in pieces. Looking out to the street, I am frightened by a gigantic ant, possibly the statue that was in the department store parking lot, who is chasing a crowd of screaming people. I fumble to pick up the bits of DVD player, when off to my left, I see my old ballet teacher, Miss Sandy, walking towards me. She looks angry, and she is foaming at the mouth. I begin to run. I stop along the way to pick up an open physics book lying in the grass (I'm positive it's mine), and even though I'm running and Miss Sandy is walking, she is gaining on me. Finally I reach the door, where the janitor lets me in with a smile, then disappears.
I walk into my room, where there is a party going on. Wilder takes the DVD player out of my hands and starts a movie. As I sit on my bed, I notice Andrew cuddling a three-foot long sock bunny. I realize that the stuffed bunny is the girl he was telling me about, the one with five names, and I wonder if maybe he's been overworked and that's why he's acting so strangely.