Dreamling

In media res:
The directions to the house are to drive to the end of the tarmac. In my world, this means an airstrip of some sort so I drive and drive. I hit gravel and keep going because I haven't seen anything resembling anything to facilitate the safe landing of any type of aircraft. The road narrows so I continue on foot. It's a pretty well-used path of packed dirt through a fairly verdant light-weight forest. My cat is with me. I hear something in the brush so I stop. A rather large, four-footed beast leaps out and it takes a second for it to register - it's a lion and it knows I'm there. My cat is scared (I briefly consider making a pun) and the lion advances. As it is leaping at me, I crouch and we make eye contact as it sails by. Apparently it was just a scare tactic as the end of its dark-tipped tail disappears into the bush.

I decide to back-track and finally figure out that the old man's use of "tarmac" just means pavement. Back to the car and I find the house - dilapidated, large, seen better days, mysterious, would be spooky but it's the middle of the day. Inside I find what I'm looking for as me and the cat explore. I gather my bits of evidence (I'm researching a connection to the Civil War) and side-step rotting floorboards. I notice an old woman in a side room and for some reason I do my best to avoid detection. Up a dusty staircase and a glance over the side and the blur of my fleeing cat alert me to the presence of the lion. Across a large room that looks down on another equally empty room strewn with bits of paper and piles of dirt(?), the cat and I do our best to be quiet, but a squeeky board gives us away. I can hear the woman below scuttling up the stairs so I clutch my folder full of documents to my chest and burst through a set of glass french doors into another empty room. Another door off to the side opens onto a rickety wooden staircase tacked on to the side of the house. Tight turns, missing boards and a cat underfoot before I reach a gate in a wooden fence. It takes a little bit to find the latch and by the time I get it open, the old lady is right behind me and I don't know where the cat went. I get to the car, the woman closing in on me (Here kitty, kitty comes out kind of breathless) and jerk open the door. The cat shoots in and a bony hand locks onto my forearm. How can something so bony be so strong I wonder as I pry one finger off at a time. I don't take the time in the middle of the panic to get a good look at her, but I'm pretty sure she's missing teeth, chunks of hair, and her eyes are so rheumy that they might as well be stagnant puddles in a wrinkled, dusty road.

The next house is much like the first and may even be the same because there is another old woman but things are all cleaned up. Nice porch, shades of green, two stories, no broken windows - same sort of fact finding mission but now the Civil War also has something to do with the 1960s. Another escape, the cat is still with me, but this time I make a break for "her" car, a Honda Element, burnt orange toaster on wheels. I get the door shut and lock it but she has a remote so she keeps unlocking the door. A key is in the ignition but I don't have a free hand and the cat isn't much help. I give up and she opens the door but she's not scary or threatening. Just wants to visit about the stuff I've found. She's the one I was looking for initially, I realize as I notice the car is parked at the end of the paved road. I get out the pictures and she is able to tell me a lot about the people in them. Cat-eye glasses, bold flower prints, go-go boots and then a little girl asleep on a pile of white bags. I can barely read a label on one and it says "White Flour". She laughs the kind of quiet laugh that means she knows more about that picture than anyone else in the world and the secret joke it tells could never quite be put into words.

"That's me," she says as she taps the slightly fuzzy black and white girl.

"You're sleeping?" I ask, "On bags of white flour?"

The little laugh again. "Oh no, it was all about cocaine in those days."

I have images of a little girl with pigtails surrounded by falsely happy people with the sniffles.

"Scoot over," she instructs me with a little wave of her hand. "Let's go into town and get a burger."

I'm elated to have found someone so knowledgeable and helpful. The cat doesn't mind either.

The rest of the dream is too boring to write about, but it involves a 1950s style diner.