DREAM ENDING IN DREAM ENDING IN CHULA VISTA, CA
by Elisa Luna Ady
My dream wakes me from my father. Our petty grievances
fed to a gospel of promiscuous ducks. I knew even then
we weren’t supposed to feed them. How the water excluded
our faces. How the dream buckled when my fingers felt
for a handful of silence. Cursed as I was with speech.
I knew even as a child I was feeding myself to perform gratitude
to my audience, leaving my orange soda until the end. Throat
roused at last from its sleepwalking. Al pastor so bloody I tasted
a step-mother who loved me. In Southern California, every
set of beige apartments announced itself like a squat pack
of crayons: Bonita View, Bonita Woods, Bonita Terrace,
Bonita Glen, Bonita Mesa, Rancho Bonita. In Chicago, it’s
a miracle what I’ve shed. The silence opened, measured
and woken. Brick for winter and basement laundry
machines, recycling the same six dreams into infinity. I see
my father pulling the cord on his laundry bag, counting out
his coins at the strip mall. The beige apartment where I sat
on my hands, speaking to no one. I was the height of orchids
the year they stitched my forehead shut, my step-mother
showing me how to build out my lie. The height of coneflowers
the year she sheared off my hair. I hadn’t even been hated
in those days. I ate as if starved. I sunned beneath my little
sister, head craned back. I forked every tongue I found.
I became an age where the birds began to speak to me and
how pathetic there was a time when they hadn’t. Pigeons
I’d once spurned and now they flooded me like fluency.
Broken wing, limping gait, plumage striated by our impurities.
Strange, but I could cry. Once, I found a loose rhinestone
from one of her old bebe tops. I wore it like a beauty mark.
Strange, but I could taste pineapple.
fed to a gospel of promiscuous ducks. I knew even then
we weren’t supposed to feed them. How the water excluded
our faces. How the dream buckled when my fingers felt
for a handful of silence. Cursed as I was with speech.
I knew even as a child I was feeding myself to perform gratitude
to my audience, leaving my orange soda until the end. Throat
roused at last from its sleepwalking. Al pastor so bloody I tasted
a step-mother who loved me. In Southern California, every
set of beige apartments announced itself like a squat pack
of crayons: Bonita View, Bonita Woods, Bonita Terrace,
Bonita Glen, Bonita Mesa, Rancho Bonita. In Chicago, it’s
a miracle what I’ve shed. The silence opened, measured
and woken. Brick for winter and basement laundry
machines, recycling the same six dreams into infinity. I see
my father pulling the cord on his laundry bag, counting out
his coins at the strip mall. The beige apartment where I sat
on my hands, speaking to no one. I was the height of orchids
the year they stitched my forehead shut, my step-mother
showing me how to build out my lie. The height of coneflowers
the year she sheared off my hair. I hadn’t even been hated
in those days. I ate as if starved. I sunned beneath my little
sister, head craned back. I forked every tongue I found.
I became an age where the birds began to speak to me and
how pathetic there was a time when they hadn’t. Pigeons
I’d once spurned and now they flooded me like fluency.
Broken wing, limping gait, plumage striated by our impurities.
Strange, but I could cry. Once, I found a loose rhinestone
from one of her old bebe tops. I wore it like a beauty mark.
Strange, but I could taste pineapple.
Elisa Luna Ady is a writer from Southern California. Her work is featured or forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, The Best Small Fictions, matchbook, and elsewhere. She’s a current MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University, where she's at work on a short story collection and a novel. She writes about the sanctity of grandmas and liquor stores.