I had this dream once. I dreamed it rained enough to reshape the continents, and in a dark room a woman traced a projection of the world map with a laser pointer. Since the global flooding, a new race of angels had inherited the earth. I was one of them. My wings hadn’t opened yet; they were made of thick, mint-green glass and folded into a perfect circle. Hunched under the weight of the disk, I tried to memorize the subtly shifted nomenclature of the countries. The other angels held my hands. I always knew the world would end before I made friends.
I had this dream once. I dreamed I was a seagull with gray-wedged wings and thick girly eyelashes, and I was diving for shrimp off the California coastline. There were other gulls, but most of them were dead. It was the water. The water was bad. It was warm and oily and glazed with something like metallic gelatin. I didn’t know what to do. I could feel my human body imprint itself on my bird body— fingers inside feathers, lips inside beak, marrow inside bare, buttressed bones.
I had this dream once. I dreamed there was an ocean where once there was suburbia, and through the mad scramble to secure belongings to rafts, the coffee shop was still open. As my family shoved our charcoal-colored minivan into the water, I looked over my shoulder and wondered if I had time for one last mocha — the last mocha ever, as far as I knew. I decided against it, and we joined the fleet of floating cars and drove with our windows down until we reached the striped sandstone cliffs of the Grand Canyon. There was no one else there, just the pristine turquoise water below us and the promise of the Eden we would build.
