In dreams

Martha tells us her dreams from across the table, she’s sitting close to Dennis and there’s the cigarettebutt of a candle in a drinking glass casting ghostly shadows up on her face, they flicker idly making a dancing pantomime out of her white blouse. She is telling us of the pie, of a clonazepam-plus-wine-induced dream she’d had of a pie that she should cut into 16 equal slices and even though she did have one of those 8-blade pie cutters using it twice did not amount to her reaching the correct proportions. And what do you dream about?, she asks me.

I seldom dream of sex or of comic books, I answer her flat-out as if trying to prove a point and it’s the absolute truth because I all-too-often dream of regular idiotic mundane situations like a conversation at work or something even though the night before I’d had this dream in which I was in bed with Cybill and Lucy Liu in a threesome and it was pretty cool even though I’m not really a big fan of Lucy Liu movies nor had I watched any lately. Cybill, sitting by my side says she rarely remembers her own dreams, but says she did remember the one from a few weeks ago, in which Dennis was dating someone she’d never met. Now Dennis himself from the other side of the table doesn’t say much, of course— sort of says we’re sissies for taking sleeping tablets, something like that, then of course sips once more from his champagne glass and orders in a second bottle.