The book of mars

dreamBirthday Party

I’m in the car with Pehry. He’s driving pretty recklessly with someone else in the front seat telling him to slow down. We take a sharp turn into my dad’s auto shop. The parking lot is full of tiny cars for children but exact versions of their bigger counterparts. I keep saying I want one, and then remember that I “have” one, a tiny tan minivan. It’s parked out back.

We get out and go into my dad’s shop. It’s a party inside; it’s my birthday! My family and friends are all inside. No one pays too much attention to me, but in my dream world this isn’t strange and I am content just walking around looking at the things in the shop.

I walk over to my Nana who is sitting around a turntable. There are old nursery rhyme records all stacked on it. I go through it and each one is colored and decorated with story elements: one is green with a frog, one is red with a pony, one is blue with a bear, etc.

My mom comes over to me and gives me a little ticket. It says “dunk house” and I interpret this as a ticket for me to go into one of those dunk booths at the fair. I quickly give it back to her, and she explains that my Nana is in the dunk house at the fair this year and with this ticket I can dunk her no matter if I hit the target or not.

Everyone keeps doing their thing at this mini-party and Autumn comes in from somewhere. She has her school bag, and I “know” that the door behind me connects to a few classrooms. Because she’s really big, everyone gets nervous and kind of moves towards the middle of the room to make room for her (she’s not THAT big).

She comes over to me and talks about missing a certain project that she’ll have to re-do.

“What? No, that project was that we had to listen to records in class. Why would you have to do that out of school? It’s so easy and dumb,” I say. She has her usual bad attitude and just shrugs her shoulders and says mean shit about everyone around us.
Someone outside is driving a specially-made car.

“Isn’t that the car Marty made that runs off blood instead of gasoline?” I say.

“Yeah I know about Marty,” Autumn retorts as if it’s “cool” to know Marty and she wanted to make sure I knew that she knew about him. We talk about how the problem with the car is that the blood soaks through the seats and stuff so your clothes get bloody and you can’t keep papers on the seats and stuff like that.

Fragment

I walk into a really small classroom. There’s a substitute teacher (who is an actual teacher at a school I went to) and a chocolate cake sitting on the only table in the room.

“Fuck yeah!” I say as I come in and sit down. The kids behind me are excited too: cake and a substitute. I have déjà vu (or perhaps I dreamed this before, or perhaps a dream memory) that I had been to this class and had cake before.

I get a little embarrassed because I don’t know how to sit without being too close to anyone. Kate (a…friend of mine) is here. We all take big slices of cake and talk about dumb things.

We have a project to do in class: listen to a few certain records. The teacher changes from the substitute to my old U.S. History teacher.

Fragment

Jack, Heather and I are looking through a big dumpster of metal scraps, looking for good pieces to put into a trash compactor. We are having a lot of fun doing this.

Fragments of Fragments

• A room made of zebra print. Not painted over or wallpapered, but the structure is the patterns of zebras.
• I check a letter written to Morpheus, looking for a response. I go through sheet after sheet, looking for markings.
• I go downstairs and make myself toast.