lassie

Denial

My husband and I were walking through a national forest. I sported all the buoyancy and porcelain complexion a young wife need boast, and the depth of the late spring shade and the bright greenness of the new leaves were as velveteen to the extended palm of the dreamer.

We climbed a hill. Weary and flushed, I discerned a hammock in a shaded nook. I approached and lay back in the hammock, meaning to rest a while. My husband was young, tall, and even slimmer than he is now. His hair fell to his shoulders as he climbed into the hammock, suddenly determined, and on top of me. We began kissing, the heat rising again, now distinctly from between my legs. Still kissing me, he started unbuckling his belt . . . and the moment was about to fully be what it had become.

But something happened. It wouldn't be what it only apparently had become. I felt wet all over my abdomen and lifted my head to visually acknowledge alarming scarlet seeping everywhere, a bloodbath alternating in my vision only with arcs of retinal spark. And then I saw: his abdomen was split down the middle, where it had apparently formerly been sewed shut. I pointed out in horror to him, "You have been wounded all along, and now it is open again!" The lovemaking was interrupted as he jumped up backwards, as if by the reversing magic of a remote control, where we were suddenly the cinema of our life together.

He stayed silent and held himself together, noticing the old wound only now that I had pointed it out. In more horror, I thought to look now at my own abdomen. It, too, had a gaping wound. I jumped up out of the hammock and backwards, too, holding my guts in and glaring at him from the opposite side of the hammock. I had "caught" his wound as contagion, integrated it into my own pain. I glared at him and we said nothing as the spring breeze blew in the everlasting interval, spring butterflies fluttered, and we each held it all in, the lovemaking apparently disrupted forever . . .

And then . . . in the nonsensical way dreams can't confront any more sameness, I was even younger, in a Macy's store window, trying on big, puffy, purple prom dresses, oblivious to anything but how pale I looked in the most royal of colors . . . which wasn't, at any rate, red.

"Where were you?"

"Nowhere."

"Then why were you late?"

"If it was late, then I must have been blooming. You, however, are still burying the dead, and what has it yielded us?"

Radio silence; cinema; cut! . . .