I’m not going to tell you how my arms are tingling and why, how a patch on the back of my head is tingling, too. It was the dream. The dream would have been enough. But it was also the nightmare. I won’t let the dream become words yet. I won’t let the nightmare become words yet. They are both doing their work inside my body as crickets or something like crickets sing outside my windows in the Southern Utah desert.

The crickets sing on the other side of a world taken by humans, wrecked by humans, a brackish world like parts of Lake Texoma where nobody ever drowns except those who do.

In the dream, a girl felt pure love and lived for the first time. The girl wasn’t me. She was me. In the nightmare, children are gathered around my dog Fifi at my fifth birthday party. Ruthie is there. Her brother. Sara. Lola. Corey. I am there holding a stuffed bird who sings “Fly Me to the Moon.” I am dancing with the bird, spinning in circles. Sara is petting Fifi. She looks bored or scared or both. We all do. Fifi turns into my father. He’s doing karaoke. He’s drunk, gaze untethered above his mouth and nose. He’s looking down at us, on us, at whoever’s holding the camera. My party father. My gilded father. I want us kids to scatter like balls on a pool table. I want us to glide across the table and fall into pockets where we can hide. We don’t. We’re stuck, frozen. I wake up, leaving the other children there. I wake up tingling.

My nightmare is three photos from three different times. The birthday party. The bird. My father. The last one was taken long before I was born. It was another party, different children. Maybe no children. I’ll check the photos when it’s light out, when the crickets are quiet and the world has been returned to the living. These are the dead hours. They are for and of the dead. Too many dead. Too much unnatural death. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. My country ’tis not of me. Saccharin land of incivility. False freedom blings.