The book of mars

Dynamite Town

I’m flying! I’m close to the ground, no cars, just a big long road in the country surrounded by yellow and orange autumnal trees. I let my muscles go limp and the wind takes me higher, passed the power lines. If I go too high I get a little nervous I’ll never come back down, so I stabilize myself a few feet above the power lines. “It feels so good to be flying, finally,” I say.The wind is warm and everything feels exhilarating.

A tiny voice in my head starts talking to me: it’s my mom! I lose lucidity. She wants me to go get “Cochla root” for my dad, who has a bit of back pain. I need to go to the medicine woman we see for the herbal nutrition we buy from her.

Luckily, my school is having a trip to the same area today! Now I’m on a bus, looking out the window. We’re here, in the little mountain town where she lives. I call it a “boomtown” but for other reasons: all around us, people are working with dynamite in the mountains to access the gold and coal that are inside. The surroundings are all dirt and mud with laborers outside on this particularly rainy day. The houses are scattered boxes on the fields passed the dynamite lands. The bus rides through on the only paved road I see.

Out my window I see a girl who’s working. I look in her eyes as she works. There’s a connection here, one that I’m uncertain of but I feel something. I want her to look at me, but the bus passes before she turns.



Ahead, the other bus of students is returning from the town, going home. There is only enough room for one bus, but this isn’t a problem in a dream. Our bus kind of goes “over” the other bus, without an accident or anything dangerous, we are on the same track but on different levels of the same road. My POV is inside the other bus as it passes below us. I see Heather sitting alone, crying. I know she’s having an anxiety attack because of all the dynamite and danger around her. Jack is in my bus and starts taunting her.

“Jack,” I say. Everyone on both of the buses stops talking. “Shut the FUCK UP.” He does. We move on.

We get to our destination soon. It’s a old fort house a little ways passed the main dynamite mountain area. Inside, I get a little scared; this is a haunted house-esqe attraction, not an informative guide through the history of the town. Although I’m scared, me and my friend Celina are the first to run in. The doorway frightens us: when you walk over it, it rains on you. This was terrifying in my dream!

We sit down against a wall and let everyone else explore the house. I go into the kitchen where the witch doing all this scary magic is kneading bread. I ask her about the medicine woman and where I can see her.

“You’re on the same road but this is the wrong house,” she says. I feel embarrassed. I sit back against the wall with Celina and text Heather. Eventually everyone has explored the scary house and we leave.

On the way home we stop at a McDonalds and I order two chicken nuggets. I receive my order and they are huge, about half the size of me! I can’t wait to give these to Heather (I’m vegetarian), but they’re really heavy and difficult to pull along.

The scene shifts to me in the back seat of a car. My Uncle Pat is driving. I don’t want to tell my mom that I didn’t get the Cochla root and she’ll have to drive back to the town. I think of ways to tell her the bad news. My Uncle is going really slow and when I notice this, he hits the accelerator and goes through a shortcut home: through a bank parking lot and then through a school playground. Before we reach the playground, my POV shifts to above the car, as if there is no car, only me and him floating (but I still “feel” that we are in a car). We start passing through the fence into the playground and I see a bunch of curved spoons on the ground.

“That’s where crack addicts do their drugs. If I was going to do crack, I’d do it here,” I say.

On the playground, we pass a teenager on a small child’s bike. Now I am riding the bike.

It has backwards peddle brakes which are so foreign to me that I just don’t brake. Instead, I kind of idle around the edge of the playground until I can cross the street. I go for it without looking, and a car almost hits me: it was my mom, we’re both going home. I find this funny.

Peddling home, I stop on the side of the street to collect some acorns that have fallen from a tiny tree. My uncle’s voice booms to me: “Stop, let’s go home!” I tell him to wait a minute and then we proceed home.

Fragment

(Copied directly from my dream journal, I can’t make sense of it)
Me + a lot of people, nighttime, afraid on couches in a big house. Julia. My cat forms into a square of space + I wake up with her still there.