Santa Fe

I was in Santa Fe, visiting Derek and Derek. They lived together in a house on a hill overlooking the town, which resembled Silverton. The houses were on a grid, very sparse and dusty, facing the Square. Sarah was also visiting.

I went to the grocery store to get some alone-time. I sat down on a cool floor in an aisle near the back and rested up against a row of canned goods. I looked at my feet and listened to the conversation of a group of employees who had gathered around me. They were telling jokes, and I thought they were very funny. I liked hearing about their day-to-day lives working in the store.

I left the store and drove one of the Dereks' truck to a small pond. I saw ducks there, and I pulled out a rifle from the back of the truck. I shot at each of the ducks as they ran by. I felt bad about using up all the ammo, so I put the gun away and drove back to the house.

I drove my car up a busy street in a strange city. I was headed north, toward a movie theater, and I had to creep along at 10 miles an hour because there were so many people walking in the road. A troupe of activists was in the street. They were wearing colorful unitards and doing gymnastics on the yellow line. I yelled at them for being so close to my truck. I was afraid that I was going to run someone over. Several of them gathered around my truck at a stop light and told me that the whole point of being in the street was to get people's attention, so they thought they had done a very good job. They invited me to attend a movie with them. I said I would meet them there. When I got to the theater, I got out of my truck and took a wheelchair out of the back. I sat down in it and rolled myself up a ramp to the theater complex. There were long lines and a party. I went into a restaurant and stood on a stool looking over the top of a table to take pictures of an appetizer. I had a camera that was shaped like a tube. I shoved it into a cake and pressed the top down to take a picture. When I got down from the stool, the camera broke into pieces and film rolled all over the floor. I was upset that I had exposed the film, but the pictures had already been developed. I picked them up off the floor, tiny black and white squares. I made my way into one of the theaters where the activists were gathering. They wanted to do drugs as the film began, but I declined. They were surprised to see me walking around, so I began to limp, pretending that I only needed the wheelchair sometimes and was having a good day. A man asked me if I had good days often, and I said that I didn't, but that if I could touch my toes in the morning, it meant I wouldn't have to use the wheelchair in the afternoon. The movie never seemed actually to start, and the activists were having a good time crawling over the rows of chairs and laughing. I decided to leave, and I saw that my wheelchair, which I had left at the door, was now gone. I was furious that someone had stolen in. One of the activists told me that it was my fault for leaving something shiny just sitting there. She said that no one would be able to resist taking something that looked like silver.

A man and I stood in a dark and gloomy cave looking down into a well that was partially covered with a broken piece of wood. I began to turn the crank to raise the bucket. Instead of a bucket, I brought up another piece of broken wood with a large number of microfilm reels in paperboard boxes sitting on it. They were dusty and falling apart, and many had thick cobwebs strung across them. I was nervous because several of them were medieval reels, and I didn't want to expose them to the air or get caught looking at them. They were very dangerous, and I wanted to lower them down into the well again.

Mom and I were looking for a place to picnic. We climbed up a bluff and looked over the edge. The top of the bluff was a grassy lane with regularly-spaced trees and clumps of bushes. I avoided the clumps with coyote or bunny dens in them. I saw a sunny area with a shade-dappled grassy spot and suggested we sit there because it had something for everyone.

I was pregnant. I gave birth to a dark-haired boy at 4pm one afternoon. I put him in a basket at my feet. The next day I was still pregnant. I walked to Chris' house and told her I was in labor. Chris lived in a large, wooden condo that she called her luxury home. She was happy to be able to afford it and said she would live in this area all of her life, just for the condo. I asked for a pallet and a blanket and I lay down on the floor on my side. Nothing hurt, but my belly felt so heavy and full. I watched as the lump moved toward my pelvis and lifted the blanket to show Chris and Diane. I rolled over onto my back and pushed the baby out. There was still no pain, just relief that I wasn't so heavy anymore. I sat in a rocking chair and looked down at the blond-haired boy in the basket who was now my other son. I told him that he had a twin who had been born 25 hours before him. I picked him up and called him my little shrimp. He scrunched up his face and wiggled and fought me. I held him to my nipple, but he turned his head away.

I went on a walk through a residential neighborhood. I saw a little girl I used to know walking down the other side, but I pretended not to know who she was. I heard her shout to her dad that she had seen me and would he like to say hello to me. He said that he had never liked me in the first place.

I realized that my nipples were chocolate, so I went back to the condo to try to feed the baby. I detached my left nipple and put it in the baby's mouth.

I went out again and leaned on a wooden fence along the edge of a grassy field. I watched pairs of boys perform a routine. One of each pair had a bike, and the other had a table on wheels. The boys on the bikes pushed the boys on the tables back and forth across the field, very slowly. They called it Eschalon. They were very graceful, and I wanted to be a part of it. I got on a school bus with them and sat behind one of the smaller boys. His mother sat in the seat behind me. I asked the coach if I could be on the team, and he said I didn't have enough experience. The little boy left his seat and looked in a bag under the driver's seat. He came back and handed me a certificate that showed I had participated in this event when I was a little girl and had scored a 7. Though this was a low score, the coach grudgingly said I could be on the team.

I stood next to a fighter pilot captain. We looked at a fighter plane sitting in an open area in front of a barn. He instructed the pilot to honk his horn 18 times as part of a pre-flight plan. The pilot honked his horn 19 times and smiled happily. The captain and I knew there was some interference with the pilot's ability to count. We looked up at the sky. Aliens were coming.

I began to run across a field to get to my own plane, chased by very tall, naked men with spears. I knew I couldn't get away, but the men weren't chasing me very hard, and I knew they probably wouldn't try to do anything if they caught me. I picked up a spear with a jagged point off the ground and tried to throw it at one of them, but it only flew a few feet.

I was strapped into the nose cone of a fighter plane. The plane was long and narrow and arranged in a line with several other fighter planes facing the edge of a cliff. There was a man strapped in behind me. We were training for a sky diving mission. The nose cone opened, and the planes rolled forward toward the edge. I felt the ground drop off below me, and the plane kept pushing forward until the back tires were on the very edge, and the whole front of the plane protruded into space. Slowly the planes began to roll over to the right. I held on as I went upside down. When the planes were upright again, they began to pull back from the edge of the cliff.