smooth

GRAVEL

8.  (Dream) I'm at Orton Plantation spending the night in the main house with my family. I'm in a bedroom on the ground floor with my two dogs, Achilles and Paris, and the rest of the family are in upstairs bedrooms. I love the dark. Achilles rolls over so I can pet his little barrel chest and I realize maybe I shouldn't be rousing him in the middle of the night. Well, it doesn't matter. I'll just let them out through the garden door. Both dogs hop down off the bed when they realize what I'm doing, and opening the latch of the glass paneled door, I let them out through the crack, then carefully close the door again. Back on my bed, I'm amused to discover some thumb tacks still stuck on the wall from where someone has ripped a poster loose. You can still see tiny ripped pieces of the poster behind the tacks. What would my stepfather think of this? It's his damn family's house! I remember seeing thumb tacks in a fancy office supply store in a mall near Old Town in Sacramento. I can't remember exactly where the store was. They had so many tacks, even transparent glass thumb tacks! Maybe I should put an image of an arch on my new website, something fancy like the photo on my sister's. That might be a sufficient symbol for the nouveau-riche power brokers who most certainly will circle mine, like wasps or bees. Achilles and Paris come into the room from the other direction. Hmm. Someone must have left a door open from the other garden. (Fin)