This Month's Story

He’s staring down at me, his head inches from my face. I yell and sit up. Holly runs down the bed and with an audible thump (he’s gained weight), jumps to the floor. Stella turns away from me in the bed and pulls the covers tight around her head.

Tossing aside covers, I push myself to the bottom of the bed. My shoes are in the narrow space beside the bed and I don’t want to trip over them. I stare into the dark room that comprises the small core of our trailer. I finally make out Holly by the door. It’s 04: 30 and he wants out.

Stella doesn’t want me to let him out at night. He comes back all covered with the all pervasive post-Katrina dust that constitutes half the world outside our trailer. It’s bad enough during the day when she at least can grab him and dust him off. It’s different if I let him out at night. Then when he returns he hops into bed with us and we end up with a bed full of the same dust. So Stella says, “No” to his going outside at night.

As I stood there in the dark with Holly looking up at me and Stella already back asleep in our bed, I make a quick choice. I let Holly out.

There is a problem with living in a travel trailer: it’s too small. And yet, thanks to Katrina, many of us are now living for a year in something that was meant for a holiday weekend. In these tight quarters, Stella and I occasionally have our differences, but I usually give in knowing that if I don’t, it will be a Wendy supper night. Stella on the other hand does her share of giving in since I know how to fix the whatever when the whatever goes bad. So despite the glares we sometimes give each other during the day, we go to bed together and share the dark night.

It is a magic time. In those quiet hours of darkness, Stella and I can lay with each other in a bed isolated from all else. It is a time when together we can believe that what we saw during the past day’s glaring light was not the true world, but rather a horrible, seemingly endless dream.

In the soft comfort of our dark isolation, we can believe that it has all been a cruel hoax, that when we wake in the morning, the real world will have returned, spinning wonderfully in its rightful sane orbit. We will rise and see once again a bright sun pouring through the windows of our home, a home exactly the way it should be, restored as we remembered. A shower can be had in a roomy bath, a paper will have been thrown on the porch waiting to be read, coffee will be making in the kitchen and, sitting on the long porch with Holly, Stella and I will watch the making of a new day.

But now as I stand in the cold dark of these early morning hours, I find this fanciful respite has been snatched from me. Holly’s wanting to go to the bathroom, has started my day prematurely. I find myself being forced to face the depressing reality that beyond our door there is no green lawn and flowering azaleas, only the same gray dust and rubble that was there yesterday.

But then solid reason steps in. With Holly out, I secure the door and go back to bed. There is an hour or so of darkness hours left. Maybe, in those few hours, I can catch again my dream of softer days.