Wed., Oct. 4, 2006

Kate woke up thinking about a corpse.

The image should have been faded like an old photograph wearing around the edges. But instead it felt fresh, more real than yesterday, as vivid as a minute ago.

There was a buzzing sound. She had to clear her head with some effort (she could still clearly see the hand lying awkwardly off the bed-the flesh was pink but it was cold to the touch) and realize it was just the alarm clock.

Her hand reached out and fumbled over buttons until the noise stopped.

She took a dim account of her surroundings and tried to let the dream go. Of course, it wasn’t really a dream at all. It was a memory, a related but fundamentally different beast.

It felt stuffy in the room. Kate got up and walked to the sliding glass door. She opened it and felt a breeze blow past. She walked out onto the balcony of the Hotel Leesburg and was treated to a partial view of the town. Zoning laws did not permit any tall buildings within the city limits, so the view was a poor one.

Still, she breathed in the crisp fall air and took in the orange color of the leaves. It might have been beautiful, but she barely noticed.

Why is it always the same? The image of walking across the ground floor of her childhood home, so real she could feel the carpet beneath her toes. In the dream, she knows what is happening above her but cannot stop. She’s stuck on repeat, a character in an old home movie doomed to do the same thing again and again.

But the dream (or the memory, it didn’t matter anymore) could not explain why she was here-why she had come back. Kate stared down the street and felt her hands grip the cold rusty railing. What was she doing here?