“I had a dream that kept starting over. A woman I didn’t know was leaving a building—a bank?—and the revolving doors spun her back into the building. She tried again. They spun her back inside again. It was like a comedy at first, a silent comedy, but then, in my dream, I could hear the people in the building worrying about her. One man had alarm in his voice. A woman was crying. It got tragic fast. She couldn’t get out of the door. Then I started to try to wake up, from within my dream, and I couldn’t, and then one of the voices I heard worrying about the woman addressed me. What do I mean by that? I guess I mean that it got clearer, shifted in orientation so that it faced me directly. It was a woman’s voice. ‘You can’t get out either,’ the voice said, in a tone that wasn’t quite a question, wasn’t quite a statement. The voice addressing me was clear, then muffled, clear then muffled, I phase, and I came to understand that it was the voice of the woman trapped in the door. Was she sympathizing with me? Was she fusing with me?” But he wasn’t listening. He was thinking that he liked everything about her except that she was okay with putting a milk carton back in the refrigerator crooked. Their wedding, still set for early August, loomed on the horizon like a ship whose hull had just been pierced and which was about to go down.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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