Overthunk

Tears streamed down my face this morning. "You could've let me say five more words, you know, just five more words." In my head, I was complaining to Dream. Outside, I was sobbing quietly. In the previous scene, I was on other business, with some somehow familiar friends, when I had a feeling my mother was about to go, and I'd better get over there to see her. I left where I was, and went somewhere else. I thought she might be gone, as if she were very ill somehow, but she was there, on a low bed, in an odd situation, bunking up with someone, as I'd never allow her to be in real life. As I opened the door, she woke up, and I felt relief she was there. She was sleepy, but alert, in her right mind, as she sometimes wasn't during our lives in this realm, looked better than she did at the actual end. Her hair was in her usual updo, messy from sleep, blonde and wild like mine, wearing a bright fuschsia gown with colorful piping at the sleeves.  I knelt down to ...

Last night*, I went to the gun store. It's newish, having appeared in the local shopping center next to the Target about six months ago. I'd been curious about it, but didn't have a reason to go, really. I own an inherited firearm, a cheap, crappy, tiny .22 with a pink plastic-inlaid handle that my mama passed on to me when she passed onto the next plane. I wasn't raised with guns, really, unless you count the fact that about the time I was 10 or 11 years old, my mother must've visited one of the pawn shops that weren't too far from my childhood home, and purchased a gun. Then another. And a third. I'm not sure why she felt she needed this diminutive arsenal, except that she was rather paranoid. (That's what comes of reading forests' worth of true crime pulp.) She drove around, for probably the last 25 years of her life, with a very likely loaded gun under the seat of her taupe Toyota Camry. Any attempt by me to convince her that this was dangerous f...