She sits on the bench in front of the dryer vent, thinking how odd it is that the brightest thing around her is the black sky. Civilization has ruined her. She has grown too accustomed to street lamps, the roving headlights of passing cars, the night owl’s compulsive beacon from a single window. Everything tries so hard to contrast and compete with that dark. Now everything is upside-down.
On insomniac nights she likes to start the empty dryer and sit here, back against the house, warming herself in front of the dryer vent, watching the streetlight illuminate the falling damp, and somehow the contradiction of temperatures would be enough to make her drowsy. She pulls her bathrobe tighter. What was the story of the shaman who kept himself warm on a snowy mountain pilgrimage by imagining a fire every night? Thirty days was it? Maybe he wasn’t a shaman at all, but just a man.
There is the dream. Of course. She can warm herself against the crackling trees. The tall points of hot orange light, staked out in regimented intervals along the suburban road.
And a snack would help.
She rises from the bench and shuts the side door behind her. Coming back through the living room, she jumps when her foot lands on the bread burr again. She drops to her knees, wanting to yank the fucker from the carpet so no one else gets hurt. Why does Ma always have to eat toast while walking around the living room?
But when her hands find it, the object is cold. Metallic. For a moment, she thinks it is the long-lost galoshes bow. But turning it over in the dark, learning it between her thumb and fingers, she knows exactly what it is.
One of the hair clips she flicked over the bannister while waiting for Todd.
She gathers the others from the carpet and slips them into her bathrobe pocket. She’ll put them with the untainted ones upstairs, mixing them so she can’t tell the difference. She could throw them in with the dress, but she can’t just round up all the objects that remind her of the dance and dispose of them. Tonight can’t be forgotten in the usual way. It is a body dumped in the lake that will continue to rise to the surface.
She walks into the kitchen and picks a bowl from the dirty stack climbing over the lip of the sink and washes it. She has to struggle not to knock any others down. There is only a narrow gap between the faucet spout and the wild gangbang of dirty plates, and much of the water strikes the bottom of the bowl and sprays out onto her bathrobe and behind the sink.
She retrieves Cocoa Puffs and crunchy peanut butter from the cupboard, two spoons and a paring knife from the drawer. She opens the fridge and cranes her arm to the back where the fat free milk is concealed, behind the forsaken spicy pickles and the baking soda. Ma likes whole milk “because I want to taste it,” she often says about guilty foods.
Beddy sits at the kitchen table and pours the cereal into the bowl, then the milk. Spoons gobs of peanut butter onto the cereal, using her finger to ease off what sticks stubbornly to the spoon. Slices banana circles over top, backing the knife against her thumb. Tosses the mix with both spoons like a salad. Her Good Night Brew.
The dream was unique for its composition and resolution, but not its subject. Beddy has wanted for a long time to be a god, spinning the world on the edge of her pinky nail, above disease, famine, catastrophe, decay, indifferent to the human race; not caring one way or another if their hatchets were wielded or buried; viewing with catatonic boredom their genocides, infanticides, patricides, homicides, suicides. “There they go again,” she would sigh without pathos. She would be an ambidextrous god. In her left hand would be nothing, and in her right hand would be nothing.
This dream was different. In this one, she was very much involved in the judgment. It made her feel dangerous and she likes that. Just replaying it now, she blushes from the heat of the flames on her face. She thinks the cereal might boil.
Eating Cocoa Puffs with peanut butter and banana at 2:30 in the morning, Beddy thinks she is an angry god of fire and the world is her briquette.