Flight
by Rebecca Bernard
I dreamt my mother had lost her hands. I awoke in a California king. Citrus grew outside. Lemons, grapefruit, oranges, clementines. Balloons floated in the pool. Mountains rose on either side. This is a place I hadn’t been to before.
It is strange to fly across the United States. The deserts, vast. The earth like so much dried up fish skin. After I saw the film The Passenger I couldn’t stop thinking about dust. Wouldn’t it be nice to swim inside our own unconscious apart from ourselves? That way we could look at all the thoughts, order them like paint strips. Today, I am latte.
To return eastward we flew over the Pacific Ocean. An arc. The ocean appeared. I thought, oh, all this time this is where I was. On the lips of the land. We know things in different ways. Seeing the water then, it felt like I hadn’t known the land ended. Islands appeared. All of our consciousnesses lined up, it becomes a chattering world.
What would she do without hands? Do we learn more from order or from parataxis? This is a word I have just, myself, learned.
