This Camera

While my mom was visiting over the weekend I slept on the couch which always gives me weird dreams. I had one in which I became the lover of an ex-rock n roll star who had been the onetime flame of Courtney Love but who now lived in seclusion with his family in an old dilapidated Edwardian mansion on the banks of a swamp in Florida. I can still see him and Courtney now, sitting in two matching broken rocking chairs on the splintered porch, looking out across the crocodile-infested water. Apparently this rocker had once been in a band called "This Camera" but now he preferred the solitude of his mansion. So I moved into the house to be his official mistress, I guess displacing his current wife who continued to live there as though we were some big weird Mormon cult. One day one of the other girls living in the house was sewing me a pair of britches while I sat staring idling out the window. The displaced wife walked in and she was wearing a bonnet and a big dress, Victorian-era on the prairie style. I asked how her walk had been and she answered as if from a deep reverie, "It was wonderful, but as I walked through the fields I perceived I was being followed by a large creature." I asked what kind of creature and she replied, "I think it was a shrew. It must have been the size of a dog." At this moment I felt afraid and I also felt a stinging sensation in my left hand. I looked down and there was an opossum sitting on the table gnawing on my fingers! I woke up then to discover that in my sleep my right hand had been grabbing my left hand and squeezing it hard.