When I was young, I would have these recurring nightmares, and I would run down the stairs into my parents room to my mother, tapping on her forehead till she woke up. Telling her of the nightmare, getting it out of my head. She got tired of walking back up the stairs and she got tired of hearing the same stories. She got tired of the unsolvable, so she began to tell us, my sister and I, to find the control. With aging they, the nightmares, come less frequently.

I had a nightmare today. There’s a keloid scar on my right forearm and I am standing, prepubescent, surrounded by boys. They are laughing and they are my friends and the one closest holds a swiss army knife, flipped open. I’m asking him to stop. I am asking him what he is doing. He doesn’t listen and mocks.  He takes it and rips through the scar tissue in one go and it sounds the way a box cutter would when you rip through cardboard. Now it’s gushing all over my Easter Sunday dress. 

The one from eight grade I wore when I was dragged to the chapel that morning in Saybrook county. It was small, the church, and there were lots of potted white lilies for sale all around the entrance by the main doors. I was never a big fan of church sermons. My sister would be able to fall asleep during the lecture on my mother’s lap, and I was jealous of that. I remember it being a hot, humid April, and my mother turning her bulletin into a paper fan. I mimicked this, having always hated the heat. I hated that dress too. I hated the frills that hit my kneecaps, itching, and elastic in the sleeves that would cut off the circulation in my forearms. I was never a real religious person, but I remember praying that day. That her period was just late. She was never on time to class in the early mornings, why would you expect the same from her relatives? 

The nightmare, with the boy cutting my keloid, it takes place at the train tracks behind my oldest uncle’s house. The house is the same one my mother grew up in. The house has been there for three generations, now one of my cousins inhabits it. The inside of that house always smelled of incense, ground beef, and dog. You never sat inside, everyone was always out back. To get out back from the kitchen there is this small  hallway you have to walk through. It connects everything together. The hallway smell lingers with me, it’s one of must. I was so young back then I assumed the smell was from the snake cages. I now know the smell of the must was the smell of the marijuana he would keep in the crawl space above. The hallway was known as where my uncle kept his snakes. All of them, except one. One had slipped out. Unfound, it lives in the heating vents of the house. You would see the shedded skin laying around. The only snake that never scarred me was his corn snake. I would hold it but never feed it. I just couldn’t get myself to touch the frozen rats. That’s what was kept in the fridge in the hallway; frozen rats, pop, and IPA. I would always go to the inside fridge and grab a Dasani. I roll my eyes in the present moment now at that thought, the one of the need to be so desperately different from the rest of my family. 

Outback, there is a cluttered sound of wind chimes that comes from the far side with trees. If I walk back towards the train tracks the grass becomes more unkempt. It wavers in dryness. The spots near the fire pit burnt, while the at the edges are wet from a dog’s piss. Reaching the edge at the back, there’s a chain-link fence with the hole cut. It’s surrounded by the milkweed pods, the one’s I would pick at once the fluff began to show. I make my way through the hole after my older cousin’s.

There’s loose change bundled into our tiny fists so tightly as we ducted through, always afraid we would miss the train and have nothing to show after. We put pennies out on the track. The train is close by now, you have to hurry or it will hit you. The sun beats down on us and the tracks. The tracks are hot. The graveled rocks between the tracks start to shake and the conductor leans on his horn to get our attention.  I have this irrational fear of the gravel working like quicksand and me getting caught in the tracks. My mother tells me when she lived there with her five brothers, she would have recurring dreams of the train deviating from its tracks and hitting the house. The house has been through three generations of us all now. 

And suddenly I am an observer to a memory that is not mine, not even my mother’s, but one told through the grapevine to us by Odell Wolf, my grandmother. I pull out one of the sandy wooden dining room chairs. Far back towards the hallway that connects us all to watch this play out. She’s on the phone in the kitchen and the youngest brother, Doug, runs in. He tugs at her hems but she’s on the phone, its receiver tucked into her ear and neck held up by her shoulder. She’s washing her tongs used for grilling. My father always talks about those damn tongs. How he’s never seen someone grill and scoop cat litter with the same utensil. It’s queer, how she’s washing them. I was told she never would normally. That they would go straight to the grill. (My father blames them, the Kriedler kids, running through lawn pesticides like sprinklers, saying that impacted their ability to make sound decisions. The Kreidler kids did not have a standard care of  chaperoning). Doug is tugging at her hems now and she beats him off with her tongs. She tells him to take care of the problem himself. He runs away and runs back. He grabs a cup of water, and runs towards the nursery down the hall. I try to picture what that room would look like before my uncle took the door off its hinges to be replaced with wooden beads in 2000, before the walls were painted orange by my mom in 1980.  He had set the crib on fire playing with matches and now was trying to put it out with tiny cups of  tap water. What a stark contrast is from when he climbed on the roof with the hose to spray down my mother and her mother on the front steps as a teenager. 

This time I lay out a quarter before running to the weeds, close to the hole in the fence we crawled through to get here. The train passes, it’s loud, and I cover my hands over my ears. That doesn’t help, I can still hear it and my hands are shaking with the rest of the earth. The train always takes longer than I think it does. In the silence that follows,  my cousins and my sister and I go to pick up our flattened change. My quarter is warm from the friction, and only half is flat. Staring at my failure, half of George stares back. 

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My uncle moved away to Reno, Nevada to worship the Su-God with his third wife when I was fourteen. The youngest brother lived out there before. He’s a cook, reminding me of the second oldest, who was the chef for the King of Jordan back in the early 90s. ‘Someone who cooks for a king came from someone who uses cat litter tongs to grill a dog, and I can’t teach myself how to clean my oven stove’s top,’ I stare now at the old brass oil lamp on my apartment’s window sill. It was from my mother, from my uncle, from Jordan, and now it’s there and mine. There’s a funny story my mother tells of when she went to visit him there– about how she shaved her legs before swimming in the Dead Sea, she tells that story better. When King Hussien passed my uncle corresponded through letters of condolence with the family dated 1999. He had moved back to America before that. There was an excursion to Florida where he claims to have “spoken in tongues”. This trip he went on called him to become a devout follower of Jesus and the Bible and give up everything he once loved. On my rarer visits home nowadays, I like to look through the photos and letters from that time and tell myself little false narratives from the photos I have of her, my mother, in Petra.