the boardwalk nightmare

She isn’t who she says she is and that is how she manages to marry my father and become my stepmother. In the waking world she is actually the woman who gave birth to me but I am so far removed from that place. She has no name and a menacing shadow constantly obscuring half of her face. And she is a bitch.

The details of my actual mother’s death are never revealed to me and it doesn’t really matter because knowing probably, most likely, would not change what happens. All I know, all I remember is that this woman causes nothing but terror for my sister and me. We live on some costal town, probably somewhere in California because it’s sunny and temperate and wonderful. So probably San Diego.

The details are fuzzy. The four of us (Dad, Stepmom, Sister and I) are walking down a boardwalk, crowded with people and abuzz with noise and activity and excitement. Stepmom (remember, she is my real mom in the real world), is complaining to Dad that Sister and I are terrible children and we need to be sent to some strict, under-regulated, off the charts boarding prison school camp where they “straighten” children out. (Ironic note: they all undoubtedly sodomize their “students”). We are, naturally, vehemently against this option and insist that our stepmother “shut her fucking cracked-out mouth”. I don’t know about the choice of words there, but they were spoken.

This of course launches her into a fury. Flames seem to literally erupt from her hair and eyes and mouth. She screams and bellows and waves her hands in the air. My sister and I run. My Dad does nothing. We run past quaint little shops and bums and beaches. We run up streets with cute houses that are completely different from every other one. The palm trees are suddenly replaced with oaks and elms and spruces and there is grass and the sun is just a little colder. Behind us some yards away the beach and boardwalk remains, but we are now in Michigan.

Oliver Street. And we burst into our grandparents house (the home of our stepmother’s parents) and rush up the carpeted stairs to our grandmother’s room. And she is sitting on the edge of her bed, rubbing her eyes as if she has just woken up. Her face is aged and worn and covered with wrinkles that make her age almost impossible to accurately determine.

We fall to our knees, the two of us exhausted and crying. We beg and plead with our grandmother to protect us from the woman who has somehow tricked our father into marrying him and threatening to send us so far away. She speaks softly and assures us that we are going nowhere.

And then, as if on cue, the raging psycho burst into the room, the flames having died out. She points an accusatory finger at our faces and demands that we return to the boardwalk. The boat is ready and we are to be shipped off. Our grandmother stands and tells her daughter that, just because she failed her as a mother was no reason to take it out on her own children. And at this our stepmother slaps our grandmother and we scream because we know, at that moment, we are going to be loaded onto a boat and taken away to some horrible place and

I wake up. It’s 2-something in the morning. I really need to figure out how to sleep a whole night through.

In other news, I am pretty sure my mom’s conversation with that Cox rep last night is the cause for this dream. I’m almost pretty sure it’s almost impossible for my mom to actually be my stepmom and/or breathe fire. I hope.