What We Dream
Chelle lives in one of those cream-colored cookie cutter homes at the top of skull hill. The native people named it skull in Spanish, and until the builders dug into the hard scrub dirt, no one knew why. The bulldozers unearthed dozens of skeletons, ancient, peaceful, weathered, buried with pottery and scraps of frayed arid clothing. I moved here after this happened, but I heard ugly rumors that the builders gathered the bones and dumped them from a speed boat in the dead of coastal night. They graded the land, then displaced coyote and mountain lion with sewage lines and concrete paths, and now two hundred fifty homes of cheap dimpled stucco stand in ringed layers around the water tower, a birthday cake of progress and death.
Chelle found my Avon brochure at the Filipino nail salon. It was wrinkled and sticky with several missing pages, so she copied my name and number from the back cover and called me one Sunday while my young boys made newspaper starships and I read an article praising healthy-sized women in a trashy celebrity news magazine.
"Hello? Is this Birdie?" She squeaked the words, such a high pitched voice, a queen parakeet voice, and I had to ask her to repeat herself three times before I understood her question and answered yes, I am Birdie.
"Good. I had a dream the other night and then I found your book at Bagasbas Nail Salon. I need a new book because this one had someone's lunch smeared all over it. Pizza, I think." She squeaked out her address and I promised to visit the next day.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath after I hung up the phone. My left hand still held the tabloid, a death grip hold, the front cover now ripped in three places, a mirror of my funky Filipino Avon brochure. I let it fall to the floor and cursed my Avon career. She lived next door to my last lover. The last time I drove down skull hill I grabbed my multivitamins out of his medicine cabinet and shoved clean pink cotton underwear and cheap drugstore shampoo and my copy of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and I slammed the screen door and screamed I would never visit skull hill again. Never!
But time and money talk. They talk. I drove to skull hill after I thought my ex-lover left for work. I took the back roads past the new Walmart, through the new construction wax ripping the hair from the back of the hills, thousands of silver pipes organized in piles, and I wanted to grab a stick and hit them, hit them like an unholy marimba, make music for the uprooted dead. I coasted into her drive and ran from my van to her door, hiding my face with my backpack. I knew her house well, the way oil spots marred her drive, the saggy azalea under the mailbox, the way my lover's avocado tree reached across the fence toward her bedroom. I stood in the entryway, under stucco eaves, gathering my wits, but before I pressed the bell she opened the door.
"Good. I saw the name and I thought it was you. Come in. I had a dream about you and you need to hear it."
To Be Continued....
9:13:35 PM 
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