(from my paper journal, a while back…)

The prairie smelled of summer this morning— sweet dry grass and the faint scent of insecticide— a smell that always makes me think of July, watching fireworks over the lake and setting out on the front porch all night talking, just to cool down. But summer came late this year. It is already August and just getting hot. I think that’s what made John say we should leave today.

It was hot so I said I wanted to cool down. John drove us to the lake. We sat on the rocks awhile. I took off my shoes and hummed without really thinking, which drives John crazy. John asked me a lot of questions I didn’t really know the answers to, how I felt about things. I was too busy watching the mist roll across the lake, and thinking about how it made the white houses on the other shore look like smoke. I started thinking about the world on fire.

I told John we should go swimming but he pointed to the mist rising off the lake and said the water was still too cold. But I jumped in anyway, and when my body started going numb, I felt better than I had in a long time. That’s when John made me get out of the water and drove me home.

I shivered in the car the whole way back. I stuck my hand out the window and moved up and down with the air currents and thought about birds. I think John knew what I was thinking because that’s when he asked me if I wanted to leave.

“Where would we go?” I asked.

“Anywhere,” he said. “Anywhere but here.” His voice sounded far away and his eyes looked far off, as though the road we were on would never end and we’d just drive forever.

I said I wanted to see the ocean, because I’d never seen the ocean before. I wanted to look across water and not see another shore. I wanted to stare at forever. All John said was “That’d be good,” cutting himself short, as though he had more to say. But I was too busy feeling the wind in my fingers to ask what.

I dreamed about Cecille last night. We were kids, sitting in the back seat of our parents’ station wagon. We were driving to our grandparent’s house in Eau Claire, which we did every July for the fourth back then.

I stared out the window, watching for patches of Queen Ann’s lace and cone flowers by the roadside, wondering why our mom called them weeds, because I sure thought they were pretty, and I imagined carrying a bouquet of wildflowers if I ever got married.

The air conditioner in that station wagon had never worked and Cecille kept complaining that her legs kept sticking to the seat. Cecille stuck her hand out the window, like a bird, and Dad yelled at her and told her that was a good way to lose a finger.

Then the Beatles came on the radio and Cecille shouted to turn it all the way up, because the Beatles were her favorite. It was that funny song, the one that goes “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da,” and Cecille and I knew all the words so we sang at the top our lungs.

Desmond takes a trolley to the jewelry store,
Buys a twenty carat golden ring,
Takes it back to Molly waiting at the door,
And as he gives it to her she begins to sing.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah!
Lala how the life goes on.
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah!
Lala how the life goes on.

In a couple of years they have built a home sweet home,
With a couple of kids running in the yard,
Of Desmond and Molly Jones…

Cecille turned to me, suddenly very serious, and said “That’s the thing about life, Janie. It goes on.” And I realized that her hands were growing feathers, turning into little black birds, and they flew away. I gasped, out of surprise, but the gasp turned into a cough, and then I was choking on black feathers and Queen Ann’s lace.

I woke up crying and unable to breathe.

I wondered why I hadn’t ever told her that, that life goes on. Maybe it was what she needed to hear. Or maybe, she already knew. Already knew the thing about life— that it goes on, and it goes on, until the day that it doesn’t.

Maybe that’s what really did it for her.

John showed up this morning with coffee and french cruellers and a pack of cigarettes and about a week’s worth of our mail. We kept forgetting to check it. John asked me what I wanted to do and I said I just wanted to stay in bed a while.

So he crawled in with me and he fell asleep holding my hand. I wasn’t tired but I laid there for maybe an hour with him, just listening to him breathe and taking in the faint scent of his sweat mixed with tobacco smoke. It made me feel safe.

But then I was hot so I went out into the yard and laid on the picnic table for a while. I thought about how when we were little, we had cook-outs every night and all our parent’s friends had come. I never had any fun, because I was afraid of eating dead animals and usually went to bed hungry. But Cecille went to bed stuffed as a pig, since hot dogs were her favorite.

I decided to make dinner for John and Mom and Dad. I didn’t want to wake John so I walked to the store. I liked the sound the gravel made under my feet. At the grocery store, I got kind of lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to make for dinner and I couldn’t remember what we already had at home. I wandered around for about forty-five minutes. Then this girl from one of my classes found me staring at the cereal. I think her name was Diane, but I couldn’t really be sure.

“Hey, you were in my English class!” She was very perky. I nodded my head.

“So, like, how’s your summer been?” I waited for her to pause to give me a chance to respond but she didn’t. “Mine’s been so much fun! A whole bunch of us went to Party Cove last weekend and got totally trashed. It was a blast! But I’m so sad now that school’s over, you know. And I’m so nervous about college. Sarah, my best friend— you know her, she was in our English class, too! Well, we’ve totally been planning on going to the same college since we were like five but her parents made her go to Brown— Ivy League. I coudln’t get in, though, so I’m just going to State, and I’ll totally miss Sarah, but I’m sure there’ll be a lot of awesome parties and cool people there, so I’m sure it’ll be okay. Anyway, where are you going to college? I bet it’s even better than Brown. You totally always set the curve in that class.”

This time she gave me a chance to respond. I told her I wasn’t going to college.

“Not going? That’s a total shame! What are you going to do instead?”

I hadn’t really thought about it. I knew that John and I were going to see the ocean. But I didn’t want to tell her about the ocean because it was our secret, John’s and mine. So I told her my mom was waiting for me in the dairy section and that I had to leave.

I left the store without buying anything.

I found some old pasta and a jar of sauce in the back of the cupboards, though, so we still had dinner. We even sat at the dining room table. It was covered in dust but no one seemed to mind.

Mostly, I listened to all the evening sounds. I could hear the crickets outside and the breeze in the curtains and the freight trains in the distance. I could hear Mom’s fork scraping against the plate, and John’s throat open and close as he took a drink of water and the rough scratchy sound of my father’s hand against the stubble of his face. I could hear water dripping from the bathroom tap, the creaking sounds of our old house’s bones, my weight shifting in the dining room chair.

The world started to feel too tight. A surge of prickly panic started to swell inside my chest, like a rush of tide. Usually, I only ever feel that way if I have to say something in class, and I always feel better after I say what needed to be said.

I cleared my throat.

“I had a dream… about Cecille.”

Then I couldn’t hear anything, like the world had stopped.

Mom put her fork down and said “Janie, thank you for making dinner. That was very considerate,” and went into the bedroom. Dad shifted uncomfortably in his chair, looked at his watch, and said “The game’s on.” He picked up his plate and went into the living room.

Outside, the sky was dusted purple. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

John said “Tell me about your dream.” So I did.

John says I shouldn’t pay too much attention to dreams. He says I spend too much time inside my head anyway. But dreams have always been important to me.

After school, Cecille and I used to race home on our bicycles and the loser had to make the after-school snacks. Cecille always won because she had long, strong legs. I usually made apple slices with peanut butter or cinnamon toast or pizza bread and then poured us both glasses of diet pop, because Cecille didn’t want to get fat. Then we’d go out to the old barn on our property and Cecille would dance and I would paint.

The barn had terrible light, but our dad built a barre there with his own two hands just so Cecille could practice, and I could only ever paint if Cecille was dancing, so the barn was where I painted. Cecille would dance for hours, getting her pirouttes and plies and pas du bourees and rond du jambes just right. She always looked like a swan to me then, since her leotard was white and sometimes, the way the light would catch her just so, I’d swear she had feathers instead of skin.

Eventually, she’d glance over at my canvas and ask me what I was painting. I always painted my dreams, because to talk about them was never enough. I could never explain how the light on the rocks was golden like honey or like sitting at the bottom of a champagne glass, or how the lake was flat like a palm, a stillness that breaks your soul, or how the sky was a blue that makes you feel the kind of safe you have only ever felt as a very small child. So I’d tell Cecille my dreams, and she would listen.

Then, I thought she listened because she understood dreams. Now I know that what she understood was not being able to explain yourself.

The night breezes brought in the scent of dying flowers and citronella from somewhere not so far away. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep, the bedsheets twisting around me like a rattlesnake. I thought about ouroboros, the snake eating his own tail to stay alive, and how he is supposed to represent infinity and death and rebirth. He is supposed to be hopeful. Mostly, I just thought it creepy.

I decided to call John. He answered on the fifth ring. I said “come over,” so he did.

John said I needed to get out of the house. The bedroom was heavy with the scent of old cigarettes and stale coffee. On the dresser, an unwashed ceramic mug buzzed with fruit flies next to my crusted paint brushes and half-empty tubes of acrylics. The mail in a pile next to the bed, still unopened and unread.

We drove. A few miles from the house, there is an unmarked road that cuts through the woods and dead-ends next to the river. John parked by the side of the road, said the car would be safe until morning.

We went down to the water. I held on to John, the occasional branch catching against my shirt. The trees felt like strangers in a crowd, reaching out for me. The river looked like a snake. I could see a bend downstream, a meander where the water had sought the path of least resistance, carving and eroding the softer rock over time.

I wanted to follow the river. I wanted to seek the path of least resistance, to be a snake cutting through the softest parts of the land. I told John I wanted every person to send all their secrets to me. I wanted to know the softest parts of every heart.

“What would you do with them?” he asked.

I thought a moment. “I’d keep them safe. I’m good with secrets.” And John smiled.

We didn’t go back for the car. We spent the whole night walking back, next to the river and the trees, on the old railroad tracks. I thought about getting out of this place. I wished for endless miles of old railroad tracks to walk over, straight to the ocean.

The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when we got back, the softest of hushed blues, like a very tired child. I got into bed and John lay next to me. I closed my eyes and focused on the rhythmic patterns of my breathing. John must have thought I was asleep, because he kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand, ever so lightly.

He said “You’re beautiful.” He said “Your life is going to be amazing.” And then he left, closing the door behind him.

I fell asleep with the sun rising, thinking about snakes and trains, waiting for my amazing life to begin…

In my dream, he calls me by my secret name. In my dream, I am cold and dark and full of secrets, like the ocean.

I have never seen the ocean, but I know that it is the place where the world is born and dies. I have a special fascination with the way the world dies; everything ends in fire.

The world is made of these giant slabs of rock, called tectonic plates, that float on an ocean of magma at the center of the earth. Magma is really just molten, liquid rocks that look like fire. And when volcanoes erupt, they call magma lava, and when lava cools, it makes new rocks, new earth. That is how the world is born, mostly. But there are places where one tectonic plate begins to sink under another plate and eventually the plate gets sucked into the sea of magma and turns to liquid rocks again. They call this process subduction and that is how the world dies, mostly.

They call places where subduction happens a trench, and trenches are always in the ocean. They are deep dark places where the sunlight never reaches. The most famous trench is the Mariana Trench, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The Mariana Trench is the deepest place on earth. Few people have explored it, though, because the weight of all that ocean on top of you would crush your insides and kill you. So we don’t know much about the deepest place in the entire world.

In my dreams, I am at the bottom of the ocean, tucked into a crevice of the Mariana Trench. And I am finally safe. The water is the blackest black, like space, and the only sound is my own breath. In these dreams, I never want to wake. I want to be forgotten, drifting in darkness, forever.

This morning, I walked into town on the back roads, enjoying the soft crunch of gravel beneath my feet. The prairie in autumn reminds me of sunset, a mix of soft, hushed browns and violets, the grasses bent in the wind, catching the waning light.

I spent the entire day hiding in the library, a big house with white painted shutters and an orange cat on a wide wrap-around porch— the kind of house John says he will buy me some day, except ours will be next to the ocean, instead of the local chapter of the American Legion. The third floor is where all the science books are. I like it there because there are never any people and there are big mahogany tables and big wooden chairs that make me feel scholarly and smart. Sometimes the cat wanders in and sleeps on the windowsill, basking in the sun. I like to listen to her purr and it makes me feel safe. I read textbooks about the ocean.

John says we are going, soon, once we get the money. Days he takes classes part-time at the local community college. Nights he smokes pot and delivers pizzas to college students. This does not earn him much money. I think I may get a job, though I am qualified to do very little. But I think I would do most anything so we could go see the ocean.

I want us to arrive when the sun is on the horizon. There are about 9 million tons of dissolved gold contained in the world’s oceans. I want to see the light on the water and imagine it all on fire.

It had rained for a week straight. This is what I remember most. I remember thinking that all that water would flood the lake and I wouldn’t be able to go for an early spring swim. I didn’t mind if the water was still too cold. I liked the numb feeling in my hands and feet. Our mom never let us go swimming if the lake had flooded, though. I never understood why, since water was water. But she said something about debris and run-off and pollutants and that was supposed to be reason enough.

It was a quiet week, just the steadiness of water running off the roof and the heavy silence of boredom. Mostly, I sat in my room and dabbled with acrylics, smearing rainbows of colors on the walls, on my shirts, on my cheekbones, jumping on the bed and shouting like a wild warrior child. Dad would yell something from the living room about no bicycles for a week, but I didn’t really care, because I didn’t like to ride bicycles in the rain.

One morning, I put on all my warrior paints and braided my pigtails and felt fierce like wind. I ran into Cecille’s room so that we could be warriors together. If I was fierce like the wind, she was warm like the sun. Most of the time, Cecille would be listening to music, tapping her toes and fingers to the beat. Or she’d be reading some book full of pretty words, or scribbling furiously in her notebook.

But that morning, I found her lying in bed in complete silence. I crept up to her, like a cat, and curled up in a ball near her feet. She was silent a few moments longer, until finally she sighed a heavy sigh, sat straight up, and said “What,” very harshly, more of an accusation than a question. I flinched a little, because Cecille was never mean to me. I know that must sound like a lie, because big sisters are supposed to be mean to little sisters, but I wasn’t a brat and Cecille wasn’t mean. Cecille was calm and still and patient. She was feathers and white and snow, no harshness in her.

I looked at her face. It was streaked and red. For the first time, I saw something in her that I hadn’t recognized before, a look beyond exhaustion, a look of resignation. It scared me. I didn’t say anything, though, because I was afraid to acknowledge what I’d seen inside her, to give a voice to the thing that terrified me about her in that moment, to give it power. Instead, I asked her if she wanted me to braid feathers into her hair and I could do her make-up all white and shimmery and we could pretend we were bird spirits and could go haunt the living room.

She managed a weak smile and shook her head. On my way out, she asked me to close the bedroom door. When I did, I heard a sound I don’t think I’ll ever forget— the smallest shriek, like a very frightened animal.