We are in that bleak sepia field, nothing to hide under save a rusted frame of a box spring. I imagine my lips to be on fire with that oxide red. Kate's wearing some quilted dress of mauves, creams, and yellows. The dress goes to her elbows and knees and the metallic rust of mattress frame shifts over eager cotton and the fabric absorbs the shifting frame's rust in these obscene smears of burnt sienna. I see all this and think, "Yes, we are about to die; this is the kind of detail you see right as your narrative is yanked away from you." Then I wake up.

It's always dirt, tornadoes, water, and overgrown woods. The animals in these dreams are broken, bleeding, or cut in two in a neat, linear fashion.

A flat expanse of red soil peppered in cotton plants. A dirt road cutting through the field, leading to a three-room house, dilapidated, covered in ivory, its porch bowed towards the middle. An old Ford slowly advancing through the ruts, a rusted machine in the back trailing a cloud of smoke. A child chasing the truck, a girl, barefoot, the hem of her dress falling out. My mother's voice: "We always loved it when the bug man came."

And in this there is some dirt beneath the bumper, some reference point beneath the cheek, some area beneath the dog who drags its entrails down a dirty road where my mother trailed DDT fog, playing in its clouds unknowingly. And this is what I came from. And I wake up in my bedroom and it's encased in layers of paint that sweat instead of breathe, and my window screens are all loose from my leaping in and out at night.

My sister writes on my ceiling: "all the boys are left for dead/because they go where we fear to tread."

My mother paints over it all when I leave home.



Tabo

I turn around in the damp dankness of leaf-encased rotted husk of the abandoned doghouse. We need this house.

We... Sophie and me. The location is perfect for holing up, entombed by rotting logs felled by pine beetles. If the beetle-encrusted carcasses of logs and limbs fail to dissuade, the alternate side of our house is tetanus-coated in rich red rusted bed springs—fences for some ancient sadistic neighbor who wasted nothing. The eastern

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