Read Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) for Free Online

same damned dream.
    Here was her first account of it, which now seemed to her curiously naive and chilling at the same time.
I’m watching a little scene. A man sits writing at a desk, wearing a dark sort of gown with a frilly white tie or something at the neck. A parade goes by in the street below — but it’s not a parade, it’s a noisy crowd, as if at some kind of holiday celebration. A face appears at the window in front of the desk, which is impossible because the window is, I realize, two storeys up. The writer looks up, opens the window, and I see through his eyes that the greenish face with its gaping jaw is a human head fixed on a pole, one of several carried by the baying mob below. The people are looking up; they want something from him. If he doesn’t respond, he is in danger. He throws something out to the cheering mob, who are now in uniform, like soldiers of some kind, but very old-fashioned. I see suddenly that he’s throwing his own inner organs, his guts, just scooping them out and heaving them down to the delighted crowd. Then I look down, and it’s my own fingers that are red and slick.
    Lovely.
    Lying again in the dark and seeking sleep, she took refuge in thoughts of the wall. I miss it, she thought. I should be working, my mind is all at loose ends, restless, for want of occupation for my hands. No wonder I dream.
    But with Ricky here…
    She realized with a small shock that though she was willing to show him the record of her dreams, she shied away from the idea of showing him the wall.

    They sat together in the shade of tall trees in an enclosed patio, eating pinion brittle from Senior Murphy’s candy shop. This was one of the oldest blocks in Santa Fe, all little shops now around the green interior courtyard. She was thinking about a box of rusted iron hooks of various sizes, not enough of them to make their own stratum on the wall, which she had collected but not yet used. The trouble was some of them were too bulky to fix securely, too damned dimensional.
    They had been talking about Santa Fe, about how far it was from the rest of the world. Ricky, as always, brought news of that rest of the world — famine, oppression, corruption, dirty little border wars, the usual patchwork of wretched modern history — in stinging detail from which she turned away. Partly to divert him from a caustic account of a summary execution he had inadvertently witnessed in some benighted desert province, she had begun defending this part of the country as having its own horrors, thank you. The murders of hippies by angry Hispanic farmers whose stream and only water supply the intruders had merrily and ignorantly fouled, a priest kidnapped and found killed out on the mesa, the great prison riot of fairly recent memory, the latest rape-murder of someone’s little girl…
    “The big sky country,” she said, “is no Paradise. People will knife and shoot each other in the parking lots of bars, and bodies do keep turning up dumped in the country to dry up and blow away, although they don’t, of course. But the scale is domestic, crude, and seldom political in the world’s sense of that word.”
    “You’d never guess it,” he murmured with irony, “looking at all these placid, god-fearing people of the soil.”
    “All these lost-looking tourists, you mean,” she snorted. “I don’t really like Santa Fe and I don’t come here often. Only, in fact, when I have guests. It’s pretty, after all, at least here in the center where the old architectural style has been preserved, bastardized, whatever you care to call it.
    “But the place is so — well, you can see: even before the season gets into full swing, rich, or comparatively rich, visitors more or less take over the town. Their presence, their interests, drive up prices, jam the restaurants and the parking lots, transform the place even physically — the new hotels, the pharmacy turned ice-cream parlor — into a machine for serving them instead of