2.1 A cottage cheese ceiling

A cottage cheese ceiling traps both light and shadows behind the lit crumbly bumps and Sunny knows she will dream snow and wake up covered.  She knows she will wake up covered like the aftermath of a beanbag chair explosion when the maid (she will dream) sweeps the snow in a pile and funnels it into a new beanbag skin and she, the dreamer, is part of the sweepings and fights against the vacume and sliding inside the zippered, black bag. 

The trapped light comes through the gap in the short drapes that refused, no matter how she tugged, to be closed.  She frequently wakes up fighting something or someone, wrestling, she supposes, with her own nature.  Earlier, Mr. Brown, the Pine Tree Motel manager, came pounding on her door, shouting “You okay in there?  Hey, you okay?” because the wife in 112 had rung him at 4 a.m. and said “I think someone’s dying next door.”  Sunny has loud dreams, especially when she travels. 

Mr. Brown has become as familiar to Sunny as an old uncle, or the friend of an old uncle who is always there at the old uncle’s shabby house on those Tuesdays every alternating week that would require a visit – if such an uncle still existed.  Mr. Brown is not quite like an uncle because a real uncle doesn’t come across quite the lecher he comes across as when she checks in at the Pine Tree twice and sometimes three times a month.  Consequently, Sunny uses cash only at the Pine Tree and she’s taken to buttoning her shirt’s top button with her left hand as she levers the rental car into park and grabs up her purse to go in.  She’s also taken to pulling a coat, heavy sweater, or shawl (from the stash of coverings she keeps in the back) on over her blouse and buttoning or wrapping herself up in more layers, when she’s near to approaching him. 

She doesn’t think Mr. Brown is Al Quaida; he’s a brick or two shorter than she is and his head is as shiny as a pale, freckled billiard ball.  His cheeks and jowls are a mapwork of surface veins broken by age; age is also the reason, Sunny believes, his ears and nose have grown to outdistance other features.

On the personality front, he is cold; she feels it, not aimed at her specifically, Sunny Marie Lindegard, but at, well, at women.  Or girls, even.

Sunny travels a lot.  One week home and two weeks on the road, ear tuned to A.M. talk radio shows, the advice of self-righteous purveyors of wisdom and the ravings of political pundits who, by all rights, should be serving time, somewhere, for crimes against the minds of everyday people. 

Her job requires visits to convenience stores in small towns; the Pine Tree is on the outskirts of one, with two sister towns within easy range.  The Pine Tree is not only Sunny’s best option, it’s her only option.  Mr. Brown is an unfortunate aspect of her traveling accomodations, but people put up with worse worries and fears everyday; people get on planes, for chrissake.

Sunny-M, as her mom calls her, lay on her back on the too-soft motel mattress.  The cottage cheese ceiling holds in place and the silly thought passes through her drift-to-sleep thinking that if her mom were there, she would be there with her glue-gun plugged in and hot, ready to reaffix the first dingy white curd that might fall away.  Mom can fix anything, Sunny-M thinks.  Behind closed eyes, she’s focusing in on the acoustical tile again, the one over the shower in her motel room bathroom that’s skewed so far off where it’s supposed to be that a cat burglar could slip down through and land on cat feet in the tub below.  Yes, she had spotted the opening while tilting her head back under the shower to rinse out the cream rinse—the opening with the dark attic space beyond, a low-ceilinged attic, and the rafters, almost invisible in the recesses behind that off-angled opening – Mom could fix that.  “It’s not a peephole, Sunny; it’s too big for a peephole, you silly.  And those ceiling tiles are too flimsy to hold up the weight of any man, much less the toady width of your Mr. Brown.”  “You’ve met Mr. Brown?”  “You think I’d let my girl stay in a place where I haven’t introduced myself to the keeper?  All the same, a glue-gun would be a good thing to have. You could catch a draft standing in there under that hole.” 

There is something terribly wrong, terribly wrong.  Would be a good thing to have . . . doesn’t fit — Mom always has a glue-gun!  And there are shadowy figures, one and then two, maybe a third, dropping, cat-like down from the attic, through the bathroom ceiling on the other side of the wall at the end of her dark room.  Her room is dark and the bathroom is dark and there are no windows in there.  Only a fan for pulling out the humidity.  She strains to hear the fan, but they haven’t turned the fan on or the fan doesn’t work because other members of their team have toppled an electrical tower and power is out everywhere.  She can’t turn her head toward the end wall; it’s as if she’s been drugged or vacuum-frozen and her body no longer responds to her will.  She can’t see what’s on the other side of that slim fabrication of 2 x4′s and sheetrock, but knows the figures wear black shoe polish on their faces and black ski hats, black turtlenecks, black pants, and soft black slippers.  She needs to get to the bathroom door and lock it, but the lock is on the inside where the invaders are entering, dropping down, four of them now, just on the other side of the door that she pulls and pulls to hold shut against all their combined strength.

But she is not really pulling the door.  She only dreaming.  Sunny hates these dreams within dreams, the ones where she rationalizes she’s safe in her bed, then realizes she is truly locked in her bed by trembling, and knows, knows, that they must remain silent.  Not only the terrorists, who remain quiet because to speak will show their identity, but Sunny, too, because to make any sound will alert them that she is there.  And unspeakable things will be done to her before they slip the chain lock on her door and go out into the night.  They have plans to carry out.  By morning the Pine Tree Motel will be rubble and Main Street will be rubble.  The two sister towns will be rubble and the two-lane highway connecting them will be dust.  Sunny can’t let go of the bathroom doorknob in the dream within a dream.  She can’t.  Nor can she untangle herself from fears, go to the door, remove the slip chain, and save the world in her outer dream.  She can’t hold them in, she can’t hold them back.  Not alone. 

Suddenly bolt upright in her bed, “Mom!” strangling like a moan in her throat, Sunny decides it’s time to get back on the road.  It’s very pre-dawn.  A nighlight left on somewhere inside the motel office throws off a glow from behind Mr. Brown’s counter.  The counter is not rubble, nor the office or any part of the hotel.  Main Street is as intact as ever it was.  The two sister towns with stores she will audit today are out there, Sunny knows it, sleeping inside the wide expanse of the plains.  Mr. Brown is in his toad hole doing whatever old toads do.  She shivers. 

Her dash lights glint off a bit of white on her sleeve and she removes a white curd of dingy ceiling stuff to roll between her fingers.  Heading west, watching for wildlife, she opens her cell phone, flips it back shut.  Even if her mom were at home, what would she say?  Would she say, “You missed one, Mom,” then tell her about the dreams? 

The road is two-lane and she straddles the dashed centerline, wary of deer her headlights might startle, and rubs her eyes with the heel of her palm; they sting as if she’s rubbed pebbles into them, left red tracks to crisscross.  

Two more nights and she will be home.  Two more days and two more nights until she can sleep in her firm bed, draw drapes that close all the way, and shower with no hole in the ceiling where terrorists can sneak through.  Her wheels hit something in the road, hard, with a rolling thump.  Daylight is still just something hoped for and she can see nothing in her side or rearview mirrors, but she slows, makes a tight U and goes back.  The rental car creeps along; she holds to the left side, strains to see what thing she has ruined, what poor creature she’s wasted now – but there’s nothing.  No road kill, large or small, for Sunny to see or help die, or try to come to terms with. 

She makes another tight U but doesn’t continue on.  Doors locked, she reclines the driver’s seat, pulls all of her coats and shawls from the back, blankets herself in the middle of nowhere, and rests.  When she drifts into dreams, she is the wounded creature, a child escaped from the shabby house where an old man in the guise of an uncle did unspeakable things.  Were the men in black slippers my guardians? hiding inside a room inside a room to be there, protect me, if Mr. Brown keyed himself in?  He can’t find me now.  I am the opossum-raccoon-hare; I am the deer-child, the coyote-girl; I am hurt, but I am safe.  I am safe.[word count 1629]