plague after plague

butternut squash, spinach & goat cheese crepes, a little salad & bread, brownie cake with strawberries

two dreams.

first:
I'm back in college I think, around a building that is very hospitalish, all hard laminate surfaces and matching furniture. Navy blue and grey are the colors of everything. I think that Chris and I are playing hide and go seek or something, I'm laughing and searching him out. There's a clutch of white shirt tail sticking out of the elevator door, and I think that I have him for sure. I press the button, the door opens. But instead, there stands a young asian woman-- she looks like Sharon Volari from Battlestar-- and while I know that she's normally quite trim (though I don't know this woman), I can tell that she has swollen up because of an attack of some disease. She's huge and round, like Violet turned half-way into a blueberry. The woman mumbles something I think is probably her name, but I don't catch it. And then she keels over into the hallway floor. I think about doing CPR, but I'm not certain. Better to find a phone. I burst through a door and interrupt a tiny class (5 or 6 people) in a tiny room (maybe 8 feet square). The instructor is startled, but I ask urgently if there is an emergency phone in the room. He says no, but motions me back out the door, and I think we go find a phone together. But when we do I can't get it to dial properly. Do I have to hit 1 first? Can I not simply dial 911? I try agian and again.

second:
We're evacuating. The disease is spreading. I'm an inadvertant leader of a small group that includes Cornelius and my mother, maybe Josh, too? And others. We're heading out of the college area, working up Central. The chaos is everywhere, the roads are bogging down in cars and people and madness. We get to the area there by the NMSU branch office and we think we might be able to get into a bus. But there are crowds that are getting panicked and violent, and we don't know if we should try to risk it. Someone shouts that if we cross over the street we may be able to get into a bus there. Should we try? We struggle across the street, but decide that we should just walk. I think we're trying to get to the Brewery, for some reason. (Hey, hole up & get toasted!) We move through residential neighborhoods, Cornelius and I at the front. We start cutting through a complex of single-story apartments, kind of a warren of cute 50's townhomes laced through with footpaths and yards. Somehow Cornelius and I accidentally go into someone's house, and we only realize it once we're in the living room. We decide to just go straight through, not turn around. We find the back door in the kitchen and exit, making more noise than we'd like, but getting out. We circle through the little fenced yard and hop over the garden wall. My mom is waiting there and not pleased at our lack of attention and tact. She stares us down but says nothing. I think that we've gotten away frmo the house without being detected, but then in a big picture window just over our heads a young boy, maybe 7 or 8, appears, his eyes ringed with the red scorchy marks of the disease. He stares blankly, does he even see us? His eyes roll skyward and we take off fast. But we start to realize that we're ringed in, people that are infected but not gone yet. Still talking and making some amount of sense, but they'll be Z'd soon.