Rarely do I wake with insight from a dream that even my sleeping mind finds complicated. Seeing it all again as I stare at the window wall ceiling I recognize few faces quickly passing or a landscape rolling. There are no familiar bits of childhood impressions or an old backyard fort. My friend had asked me weeks ago, don’t you dream?

Yes.

While I slept my errant thoughts upended a toy box and dug through closets assembling scenarios I’ll never shake: I walk down a long geometric and tan corridor that becomes a hotel lobby. Rooms and staircases and people I don’t know are made of stark color. Their clothes faces bags glasses hair and words all tout blazing hues. I squint and she finds me. A girl I have never seen approaches, frantic. My brother died. He DIED. Abruptly calm, she tells me, he was asphyxiated. He and his girlfriend are curled up in bed. We’re moving upstairs and my editor is there telling me to enter the dead boy’s room. Throughout the dream I am silent and without a voice to oppose.

It’s my brother’s room, the girl tells me, but he really died days ago.

Asking if I wanted to see where he died and pushing me into the room I see a blank bed.

Death’s last posture is an appeal, my editor explains. So he gets on the bed to demonstrate the mystery of each body’s passing and the plea we need to decipher from an outstretched arm, clutched stomach, or head in hands.

From my editor’s reenactment I see that the girl’s brother had clutched balled clothing in his fist, arm jabbing out as if shoving laundry at the servants.

None of this makes sense and I wonder if Lily has tapped into some timid little corner in my head where anxiety has tossed its trash

Outside as the weather warms and snow disappears the stench of Lily’s problem is clear. How will I fix the backyard where we take her out to lift her tail and pour her food-turned-mush along the ground.

Tuesday we see a specialist. What the hell.