ONE

It is Christmastime. I am at some religious gathering of people I know but can’t name. I am well liked by all of them. There is a rafter along the top of the room and a woman comes in yelling:

Where is he?

Everyone turns to look at her. She is built like a teapot, wearing an apron, and dragging a small boy with bangs by his wrist. His hands are bloody. Nobody answers.

I know he’s in here. I saw him come this way. There’s no where else for him to go.

The boy she’s looking for is hiding in the rafters 10 feet away. He is a street urchin type and has no family that we know of. He stands up.

I didn’t do anything wrong he yells to her.

You come down here. She is threatening and has not yet let go of the arm of her son. Come down here and be punished for what you did to my boy.

He retreats so that half of him is obscured by the shadow of the rafter.

Come down here gypsy child. She addresses the crowd, seated in neat rows faced away with their necks arched back to listen. Did you all know that? His mother was a gypsy. He told my boy here and then he put a gypsy curse on him and pushed him down.

This of course isn’t true, not completely. We know this from earlier when we saw it happen:

SCENE - The boy is 10 but looks 8. there is a circle of children around him, a combination of girls and boys, though it is hard to tell who is what. They are ash blonde and dirty and he is dark haired and dirty and clutching onto something that they are trying to tear away from him. They push him around the circle, from one end to another and at some point, this thing in his hands falls, something resembling a snow globe without the water, a crystal ball with a message inside. He drops it and it shatters on the ground and stares at it for only a moment before the tears come and the other kids giggle some sort of satisfaction and he is desperate to get out of there, and pushes the son, the one we’ve already seen, to make enough room to leave. The son falls, lands hard on his back and the others go “ooooh” and chuckle some more. And the son isn’t hurt really, just embarrassed and angry, and goes to stand, placing his palms on the ground near him for leverage, forgetting about the broken glass. The boy hears his scream as he’s running away and runs faster. The mother hears his scream from the kitchen of her house, where she is washing dishes. She runs out towards the sound.

The boy stands there, half obscured by shadow staring down at the angry mother. And for some reason she says, I bet you don’t even know the names of my children. And he does, and recites them, Billy, Bobby, Billie Jean, Bobbie Sue, Beebee, Baby, and Bubba. When they’re listed out, it sounds like an insult and the mother fumes further, mutters some threat along the lines of I’ll teach you to be different.

I step in and begin a speech that starts with a proclamation of my Jewdom, but quickly unfolds to be something much more religiously deviant. I wander from room to room, saying that Jesus is no one, I don’t think he even existed in any form, man or god. I call the Bible a piece of fiction. I say these things, and I mean them, but I am saying them for shock value. Some people turn away from me, but most listen. And I ask what these would beliefs would matter on a daily basis, in daily interaction. If what I believe in changes who I am, who I have always been to these people. And when I am finished wandering from room to room, giving different incarnations of this speech, which sounds brilliant in my head, but mostly offputting out loud, the gypsy boy has had plenty of time to escape and although I am still widely accepted, I know it is time to move on.

TWO

I am on the run still, and always. I am sitting at an outdoor restaurant one step above fast food. The table is the green, grated four curved benches around a circle. I am sitting across from a boy who I do not know very well. The two others we are with, an older man and a young teen girl have gone inside to get more food. The boy is finished with his food, and I am still eating my sandwich, but it is falling apart in my hands. The boy is simple and crude and not completely unlovable. He is bored with wandering and bored with sitting and asks for a kiss, posing the request as a cure for boredom rather than any sort of romantic sentiment. With my mouth half full, I lean over the table and give him a peck on the lips, then return to chewing. No, a real kiss he says and I tell him I’m still eating. He licks his lips, says my sandwich looks pretty good and starts picking at without asking, as though we have known each other for years. And somehow this disarms me, humanizes him. I smile. Okay, come here I say, motioning him closer. And he smiles and we kiss the awkward sort of kiss where both people are smiling too much for it to really be a kiss at all. Let’s go, I say and he doesn’t ask where, but follows. We pass the other two people in our group as they head back to the table and we tell them we’ll be right back and know that we will never see them again.

THREE

This boy and I are in a room off the side of some main highway. There’s a long white stucco wall with doors along the back of the building, and we are behind one of these doors, giggling insincerely and being generally ridiculous. There is a sound from outside, of a police car pulling up, an older officer in tan like a state trooper. Stay here, I tell the boy, giving specific instructions to wait so long before following me out. I kiss him on the forehead, and I know it is goodbye, but he does not. I walk around the side of the building, evaluating which car to take, settle on a white pick up. As I drive away, I could see the door opening in my rearview mirror. I’m not looking.

on my 25th birthday, i tell my little sister that there is no santa. she cries.

my parents are not happy with me.

it feels like a beach town, but instead of sand, theres dirt or clay or some combination thereof. we are in the past, far enough back that i can't remember it first hand. i'm the only girl, there are four or five guys, some of which are assholes (by ratio alone this is to be expected.) there is a fight one night, or something resembling a fight, where some of the guys leave our house and terrorize the town. their antics make the front page of a newspaper, which i see when i go to get coffee in the morning. i hurry through, nervous i will be recognized. i am not in the picture, but i'm convinced someone will make the association.

i go back to the house and there's a confrontation with one of the guys. he is twice my size, and i shoud be scared, but i'm not, because i'm part wolf and am certain i could take him if it came down to it.

later, on the sidewalk, someone is teaching me how to smoke and i am failing miserably.

everything feels so far away.

dear apocalyptic dreams,

welcome back. oh how i missed you. thanks for bringing the ghosts.

love,
me

we have travelled, almost on a whim, to an island somewhere, telling ourselves it was on the way. there is porch and some steps that lead down to the shore. it is getting dark and i am trying to squint across the water to see the mountains in the distance. they are assembled on the sand, with the child, who is not mine, though i feel responsible for it anyway. the way it wraps its legs around my waist and buries its face into the nook of my neck. there is a wave coming, and i foresee tragedy. my camera has a way of identifying such things, and i pull it away just in time.

later, i leave and end up elsewhere, in a school courtyard, where i have stumbled onto a rehearsal for our film. there is a wooden bench and a rocking chair and a group of asian children run out and circle us.

we leave, and there is a boardwalk. we walk, bumping elbows in a gentle way.

a school gym that opens into a dining room. my schoolyard crush tries to say goodbye outside of sliding glass doors. he is afraid of our house. it is filled with animals. my brother and i are home alone.  my brother has spiky blue hair and a chain that stretches from his nose piercing to his ear.  he looks like a cartoon character, or something you'd make out of clay in a high school ceramics class. the kitchen opens to the dining room. the whole place smells like the monkey house in the zoo.  my crush is terrified. there are creatures climbing up the walls, and mid-calf height furry things running by.  along the living room floor, a snake slithers by with a mid-calf height bump in its back. my crush runs past it and out the front door. i follow, but he is too fast and long gone.

i come back inside to find the house empty of all animals. it is so clean, the edges twinkle like in soap commercials. my brother comes down the stairs that lead to the living room.  he has read hair, glasses and suspenders. he looks like the kind of kid who gets picked on a lot. 

what happened in here? i want to know.
"what do you mean?" he asks.
everything was just different in here. you were different.
"what was i like?"
i don't know, you had blue hair and a leather jacket.
he stares at his shoes. "sounds pretty cool".
yeah..
i look around. it is quiet for longer than is comfortable.
there was a snake. a big sucker.
"like how big"
like big enough that you dont want it hanging out in your house.
"i don't think i want any snakes hanging out in my house."
yeah, so it's better this way, really when you think about it.

and he looks at me like he wasn't really thinking so much about it until now.