"They caught her off the coast of..." was all I got, but I understand that in this world women are born from the ocean, living and growing there happily. However, the beautiful ones are sought by men, and sometimes caught. They are taken to shore and trained, for the purpose of having no purpose.
Her destiny on land is to be beautiful, nothing else.
While sleeping, in the middle of the night my companion leaves and is replaced with a man who snores and groggily calls me "baby".
I go to visit my parents in Burien. At midnight they go to bed and I get something to eat in the kitchen. Alex knocks on the door and enters as if I should have been expecting him and begins to tell me about an interview he just finished. Nothing he says makes sense, but I gather something is wrong, and I interrupt him to say, "I'm sorry, I have to give you a hug". He then says, "And I've decided I don't want to be an English major anymore!" and walks into the living room, rambling again. I follow him as he takes off his suit jacket and sits down on the couch. Staring at his shoulder I say, "I don't understand, Alex! What are you going to do then?" But he just says it doesn't matter, he just can't stand writing anymore. I worry that something terrible must have happened to make him feel that way, and I touch his shoulder to try and get his attention, but he doesn't notice, too absorbed in not making sense.
My brother is taking me out to Burien to get lunch with one of his friends. To get there we take a route down Ambaum, and when we get to the Baskin & Robins, which is a shady taco joint in the dream, we must take the most direct route through it before the owners get back. We walk briskly through the seating area and into the dirty back room, which is tiny and triangular, but with high ceilings. The only way out is through the small drive-thru window, which is very high up on the wall. Nick's friend goes first, then Nick, and finally I crawl through, contemplating Rikyu and the humbleness-inducing crawl-through entrances to his tea houses.
When I emerge, Nick and friend are nowhere in sight, but I am almost bowled over when a booming "EH-EH-EH-EH!" echoes through the neighborhood, and a giant old station wagon decorated as a goat barrels down the hill sans driver. It drives past me and turns to go up the next hill, periodically making goat noises. As I look around an obese black man steps out from behind some bushes on Kathryn's old street with a jolly chuckle. He clutches a crudely made remote control with a joystick, and tells me, "It gets 'em every time, and the fun never wears off!" My shock wears off and I laugh with pleasure at the man's joke. Nick and friend emerge from around the corner the goat wagon just passed, exclaiming at the genius of the social experiment.
The man directs the goat wagon over to us and parks it, and we all drink glasses of milk from the roof of the car. The man says he can't stand that watery milk, he needs something of more substance, and pulls out a carton of heavy cream. I jump up and pour it into a cup for him, but then he pulls out a stick of butter from his pocket to mix in. I stir the milk, now more than a little revolted, and wonder about the moral implications of serving pure fat to an obese man.
I am on vacation with Kris and his entire family, including the cousin I haven't met. His sister wants to go for a bike ride, but no one else is ready to leave yet. I don't plan on going, so while she is waiting she asks me questions about school, and then Julie says something that implies Mali was an art history major. Then she pulls out an envelope that supposedly includes her final grades, but the name on the envelope is not Mali, but an alternative spelling of the name Rebecca. I say, "Wow, I'm really embarrassed now, but I honestly thought your name was Mali and you majored in something like archeology or classics."
Then suddenly Kris comes up and says, "I want to get back together" and starts kissing me before I can get a word in. I find myself kissing him back, and realizing how wrong that is I halfheartedly try to get him to stop, mumbling his name. After about a minute of this I start to wonder why he hasn't stopped kissing me, so I say louder, "Stop! ...Beth!" Woah, wait, have I been saying everyone else's name but Kris' this whole time? "Why.. did I ...just say ...Beth's name?" I ask. "I mean... Stop! Kris!" Finally he pauses and I struggle to find words. I say something stupid like, "There's absolutely no reason I should allow this" and then trail off, wondering what I'm trying to say.
Kris is very persistent, not by saying much (other than "I want to get back together..."), but we still end up on the ground. While I know Kris doesn't actually want to start a relationship again (and neither do I) I don't have the energy to call him out on it, or the will to make him stop kissing me and END ALL INTERACTIONS IMMEDIATELY type of thing, so I decide to go along with it for the moment. I tell Kris that's fine, and get up to get breakfast, while he goes off to take a shower.
In the kitchen, I contemplate the English muffins, more than a little pissed. In the bag there is one half of a muffin, on top of the last whole muffin. I decide I want a whole muffin, so I take it out and cut it in half. This is when I notice that there is also half a muffin sitting at the bottom of the bag and I could have taken that and not cut up the last whole muffin.
That pushes me over the edge. As I stand there staring at the muffins with a knife in my hand, getting angrier, I decide Kris needs a taste of his own medicine, and if he's going to pretend he wants to be in a relationship with me, he's going to have to live up to the responsibilities. I am disturbed from my thoughts when his mother comes up and asks me if I've seen him recently, and I say I think he's in the shower. She asks if I will go tell him she wants to talk to him, and I say yes, quickly forming a plan in my head.
It goes something like this: If Kris wants to get intimate under the false pretense of wanting a relationship, things are going to get real intimate- and real inconvenient too, as goes with the responsibility of a relationship, right?
So I march down to the basement, planning on barging in on his shower time and demanding intimacy, but when I get down there, I can't barge in because the door to the bathroom, and the shower for that matter, are wide open. I am caught off guard, so when I get to the bathroom door, I stop and say, "Hey Kris."
And he says normally, "Hey. What's up?"
I'm feeling comfortable and say, "Not much."
"Really?" he says, kneeling down in the shower, as if posing for a gesture drawing. I am about to respond when I see he has some serious bruises on his legs.
"Yeah, hey- what are those bruises on your legs?" He looks down and examines them. "-If you don't mind my asking-" He looks at me and opens his mouth, and I can tell he could answer me if he wanted to, but instead he's about to tell me something completely different, and be open and honest for once. I know that as soon as he says this thing I am going to be able to talk to him about knowing he doesn't really want a relationship but being ok with that as long as he's honest; and we will be able to talk about what we really want without saying anything wrong.
But just then his mom comes up behind me. I didn't realize she had followed me down there, and so I quickly say, "Oh yeah, and I just wanted to tell you your mom wants to talk to you," and leave.
There is a party at my "house" that somehow involves me working and running errands, such as going to the bank.
-
I emerge out of a forest onto a two lane road with a field on the other side. I am dehydrated and utterly exhausted physically and emotionally. I stagger over to the bus stop on the other side of the road, accidentally stumbling into the ditch. I need to get away from that forest as fast as possible, but when I check the schedule the only buses coming are the Community Transit 8--s, which will not take me home and cost more than the 15-odd cents I have in my pocket. This being a life-and-death situation, I choose to throw myself at the feet of the billionaire living at the nearby mansion in hopes that he will give me a job and I can earn enough money to eventually take the bus home. I know however, that this is hoping for a little too much, because poor people like me can never just earn money from rich people like him. According to the rules, I will essentially be required to sign my body and soul away for a year before getting my payment in the end... if I'm lucky.
I ring the doorbell and somehow convince his footman to let me speak to the master. The man who comes to the door is a sweet, kindly gentleman, who has to pry himself away from the adoring orphan boys he has rescued to talk to me.
"Please sir, " I begin, "I was wondering is you might have any positions available, you see, I am in desperate need..."
The man looks uneasy and his footman cuts in, "We have no positions now. Go home."
I think of the forest I just come from and feel an intense fear, though I cannot recall exactly what I fear so much. I cut the footman off somewhat forcefully and say, "I just spent a month in that forest with my brother and he didn't make it out-"
The old man stops me and says, "Come in, I'm sure we can find something for you to do."
I step inside the marble-floored mansion, filled with leafy plants, light, and playful young boys. As I change into new clothes and an apron, I feel a sadness when I think of my separation from my own family, as well as something like guilt at the mysterious loss of my brother, and confusion about my situation in the house in relation to the other orphans. Why wasn't I taken in as this man's child? Was it because I asked for work to begin with, and not care?
One burly construction worker lays down in the gravelly grass lot, his feet towards the building next door, and gazes up at the blue sky. He calls for his two friends to take a break and come lay down with him. They do, and all breathe in deeply. One smells cotton candy, and picks up a rock next to a vent coming out of the building. It is coated with a multicolored fuzz, similar to cotton candy, or perhaps lint. He licks it. It is cotton candy! They all take a rock and lick them as they gaze up at the sky. One finds a rectangular sheet of red paper on the ground and holds it up to the sky, remarking that this was how one was supposed to be able to see the colors. The men squint, and then collectively gasp, as the colors become visible to them. After a while they start thinking about the cotton candy rocks, and decide to go find the source in the building next door. They go inside the building, which turns out to be a bakery and a candy shop, with old-fashioned counters and machinery. A young woman in a striped apron goes about making donuts, and the men talk, telling her about their discovery of the cotton candy rocks. They start insisting that she make more, and share the recipes. One man walks back into the shop and becomes very agitated by something, which starts a huge commotion with the men trying to push past the young woman. I barely get a glimpse of a back room with a high pyramid ceiling, filled with strings dripping with icicle-like dough. There is yelling about keeping such a secret, and not sharing the potential with others, and power.
