1

Somehow, we've built a rocket in the yard. It's very tiny, about the size of a Port-A-Potty, with an exterior apparently made of bronze. My gram and grandfather R.I.P. and sundry others help me stock the tiny shelves with things like a miniature electric torch. Apparently, I will be using this craft to go to Mars, but not directly. No, the ship will take me to a space station, and thence to Mars I'll fly on some other transport.

I start considering how improbable it is this little ship could possibly take me into space. It looks about as plausible as that rickety ancient Bajoran ship that Benjamin Sisko and his kid made in that Afrocentric episode of Deep Space 9. How could my little bronze ship even hold enough fuel to reach escape velocity?

As a result, I wake up, my dream of Mars unrealized.

Dreams do not mix well with the rational mind.

2

I'm back in the old neighbourhood, standing somewhere that could not exist, because I can see familiar places that in reality require different vantage points. We're on an impossible baseball diamond, not a cricket field. Someone, possibly D, helps me gather up local kids on the street to play a game of baseball. It keeps them out of trouble.

A little girl heads to a storage room of the sort that might exist in a school gymnasium, but somehow it's out here, on the street, as though the door opens into a tiny universe of organized sports equipment. She grabs some large bouncing balls that have nothing to do with any known sport. A little boy gets a vast plastic sheet containing ice lollies. While some people get theirs with ease, others have trouble. I help the boy try to get the last lime one, I try to rip the sheet to get a lemon, and then, as I struggle:

Again I awake.

3

E apparently had some kind of party in an apartment I've never seen before, and now I'm leaving. Somehow, we're in her bedroom when I say goodbye, and years melt away and we're making out with awkward uncertainty.

Actually, no one much is left. JB, who she doesn't really like, hangs around the main room with a tired and ill-sorted smattering of guests. The daughters of some acquaintances have cookies and baked goods by the door. I want a cookie, but only certain cookies may be taken.

This time the thunder rouses me from resting.

E. I have been too long out of touch with E.

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