The book of mars

A Sizable Strawberry



My mom’s driving her car. I’m in the middle of the backseat, Holden’s next to me and his little sister Sarah who is incredibly fat in my dream is on my right. Holden and I discuss selling strawberry chips, just like potato chips but sliced and fried strawberries instead. I see why we were discussing this: up ahead, there’s a giant strawberry! Not the size of a house or a mansion or even a plane, it’s the size of an airport!

My dad is in the front seat now. Instead of parking our car in the big sea-side parking lot (the strawberry is right next to the sea), we just drive up it. This scares me quite a bit because once we get the car on the strawberry, we are almost completely vertical. I ask if we could flip over and my dad reassures me that’s impossible. I close my eyes until the car stops on top of it.

We all get out and are given little green baskets to put our pickings in. I don’t see how this is going to work until I look down at the surface of the strawberry: it’s covered in little yellow tags. Each one is attached to the flowering part of a seed, which can be pulled and a perfect cube of strawberry comes out. I start pulling a few and walk over to where my dad is.

He’s on a little lake on the strawberry. It’s not too big, maybe 12 x 12 feet and full of murky strawberry-sea-water and long stems. He’s pulling huge cubes from around the edges of it and I help him out, pulling them and putting them in his basket.
Walking on it isn’t difficult, it’s plushy and kind of fun if I don’t look down: we are quite a ways up. I walk around and see that everyone is going into a little observatory room on the top most point of the strawberry. Inside, everyone’s standing kind of far back from the main window. Kayla, my ex-boyfriends new girlfriend, is by the window really close. My mom, my dad and Holden and I walk towards the window too to see.

Suddenly, the floor beneath the window lets go like a trap door and we tumble out of it. I don’t remember falling, only hitting the water. My leg is somehow attached to something big so when I start sinking, I feel like I’ll die here (though I didn’t feel exactly hopeless or bad: I just knew I could, possibly, die). My dad comes swimming at me and unhooks my leg. Kayla is still under somewhere, so my mom looks for her. When she comes up from the depths, she kind of nudges me back down and I hit my leg on a really weird smooth rock section. It happens twice but we finally make it back to the shore.

My dream repeats. Everything is the same until we are in the observatory. I change the dream so all of us are kind of next to the window but not that close, so when the trap door drops, only Kayla goes down. My mom saves her. It wasn’t malicious of me, I just didn’t want to be scared again and I had no control over Kayla.