Reckless Eyeballing

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At first the faces were a blur, but then he was able to identify the people who owned them. It was a painting he’d seen in a book about Salem, of the Puritan fathers solemnly condemning the witches, but in place of these patriarchs’ faces were those of Tremonisha Smarts and Becky French. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were moving their lips. They were mad. He was sitting in the dock where they kept the witches. Becky said something to a guard and the guard started toward him. The guard was about to take him away to the gallows, he’d gathered from the logic you get in dreams, but when the guard looked up from underneath the black Puritan’s hat she wore, she wasn’t a guard at all but his mother.

Becky and Tremonisha said cut it, cut it, and then the dream cut to a scene in the desert. He was cowering behind a huge cactus plant as a snakeskinned hand was about to cut off a rattler’s head with a large, gleaming blade. He shot up in his bed. He was sweating. He looked next to him. The cover had been pulled aside and the woman he’d brought home from the evening of nonreferential poetry had left. Her subtle perfume still hung in the air. While he’d been making love to her he kept thinking of that ad for Jamaica that contained the line: “Come daydream in a private cove.” At one point, they were fucking so heavy that they began to warble involuntarily like birds. He’d had about three gin and tonics. This drink always brought out his romance. He got up and put on a robe.

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