By Dana Jerman

THAT DREAM AGAIN ABOUT NO FEET. Not having them, not needing them. Third time in a month. Dream dictionary says: no feet = no ground. No perspective of self as a steady or unmoving thing.

So, it's a good dream then, for a dancer.

Nurse. A cigarette. Just as well a needle... No. I shouldn't say that. Ever. Especially not around her. Never again. I don't mean it.

I'm hungry is all.

Snow at four feet. Clogging doorways into mother's mother's house. First holiday without mother's father and I'm giddy with cleaning drawers. Only because it's too cold to dance where I'd like.

I try anyway.

Mothers. I don't need any more of them. Had enough, don’t care. Maybe others do.

Mother's mother chooses television as her playground. Meanwhile the sound of my toe shoes around the house. Total silence in careful climbing of carpeted stairs. Into the guest room for brief leg work. Back down and past kitchen, past television.

The routine. This time with an empty oversized gin bottle in each hand. Mother is at the far table. Her profile haloed in smoke.

On cue my fucking hip bumps the near-empty china cabinet and the light clink-rattle shakes her attention toward me. Her drowning face relates judgement like a long bang. I can't look away.

I didn't drop the bottles. Nothing is broken. Still she's out with her cold phrasing:

–Enough pointe today.

Night.

They are sleeping when I pull the box of grandfather's things. Mine now, if I can keep them hidden. 

I roll his dice: 12, 12, 11, 2. I masturbate to the instructional video for his penis pump. Let my hands slip idly thru tarnished watches and jewelry. My voice utters some underlined passages from his pocket bible.

If I've even thought I've heard my mother, I'm being too loud.

That night, the dream starts in an elevator. Then cars made of glass. The world is emitting a sound like the duct system in the house while I trip and kick on scattered upturned screwdrivers in the street.

Girls are watching a boy on a bike go past watching me. I am a dancer and I have danced through all these places, these rooms.

I am naked except for my feet: wrapped in pointe shaped gun barrels, standing atop a spotlight, turning, turning in slow motion as if trapped in a jewel box...

Won't try again today. Ankle feels a twist and mother is out walking in the worst of the snowstorm.

A kid appears to smash the doorbell. After I let him track a whole snowdrift in along with himself, I see the skull ring on his index. He smells like soaking linens and beer.

"I'm the paperboy. I run errands for Mrs. Jensep sometimes too. But, I uh, won't be able to this Christmas. My dad lives in Winchyn County now and..."

He overstates himself. I listen and watch. Stare politely back with a calm smile as he tries so very hard to keep his eyes off my chest.

Mother arrives later with a man. They talk, hushed and glamorously, in the drafty study as if they've known each other for years and maybe they have. I think I try not to care so much that she doesn't make introductions.

Joints are frozen. I gulp tea. Burning all the way down.

A day to Christmas. Five hundred days clean and I'm sick right on time. Why?

Last thing is mother's mother calling, yelling. It's 11:30 p.m. 

When I wake again it's 4:30 p.m. I am a forgotten thing in the weather of the house which is cold on my face and nose like a chill this time way past normal. Freezer cold.

Five sweaters and a hat find me breathing vapor in the kitchen. Predictably, mother left cigarettes and no note, so I have one over orange juice.

And I make myself concerned suddenly with just where those same mothers have gone absent to, with the indoor weather something now intolerable.

Upstairs the groggy silence has me hovering over my own kit. What?

My own kit. Open. Used.

Shit. Mother? Mother! That fucking useless medicator. Using. And that man. No wonder. I could keep speculating...

Phone. How long has the phone been ringing? My head.

My forehead feels like summer in the pan-equatorial south. I am not a temperate climate.

–The heat is out. Your grandmother will get sick.

–Fuck you, I'm sick now. It's a goddamn icebox.

–Sorry.

–When were you gonna tell me. Are you coming back?

–Later. It's Christmas, of course.

–Does that mean you dose on the eve with your daughter's gear? Where did you find it?

(Silence)

–Bitch answer me. If you hang up I'll find y-

(Click)

FUCK! Fucking predictable medicator! Why am I even here? Is it for her sake or mine that I can't go back? Or forge ahead? I've descended utterly from the things that excavate my own trash and attempt to haunt me with it. No more. Not one more minute more.

I am unequivocally sane with lividness in the purple light, the dusk. The kit under arm. Shovel. Flashlight. These sweatpants aren't warm enough and snow is getting all into boots and socks. This is might be dancing, but this is not dancing.

Yes, it's Christmas. Why is it here without you? I'm dropping myself uphill toward your grave and I should have better things to bury. Maybe the dice, maybe those playing cards with nudies, the Sinatra records.

Cold. Cold. Cold digging. Dark. Black Christmas, this. I'm sorry. I miss you grandpa, and this is my shitty offering, and I loved you so much, still love you, and I'll keep going, digging with my frozen hands... you can take this away from me and make me better, make us, make it, all better... here, press the dirt back. Pack it hard back over you... don't know, I'm feeling hot in all this cold grandpa, I've got a fever but I can't stop digging, can't stop dancing, can't dance with all this, you've got to take this away because I can't... Oh, help… Who? Oh. Oh, okay.

Dream. Some lullaby. Subtitles I can't read. A boy calling back dictation from the TV, still can't understand. We're barefoot in the vocal snow beyond the reach of other children. Nymph-like, they churn numbers onto a bleached receipt, I watch. I am also supposed to read this and understand, but don't.

Then I put on the jacket left in a canyon. The pocket filled with snowflakes. Melting snowflakes...

–Hello? Hello? Merry Christmas?

–What.

–Merry Christmas?

–Shhh. Shh. Too loud.

–Oh. Okay. Sorry. You look better now.

–Huh?

It’s warm. Melting warm under blankets in a bed. The paperboy's voice. I didn't know where I was, but I checked and still had sort of a fever. Holy shit, this kid probably saved me from exposure.

–Mrs. Jensep called about the house. She told my mom your heat was off and it was supposed to keep snowing and mom said I wasn't supposed to go out but I did and saw you leaving and followed you. Yeah.

–Wait, weren't you going to your dad's?

–He, he said not to come...

The paperboy shrugs between our eye contact and starts with his face crumpling in on a cry good enough for both of us. Bolt upright I grab him into the bed and rock and hold him and kiss his hair. His hand reaches up for my arm and the skull ring splashes in my vision like a chime and everything goes flat like in my cinematic dreams and I don't fight because I'm cured. Everything can be better now..

It's Christmas and all of us who really count are right here again, dancing.