1 Chapter One (When Life is a Question-Mark-Shaped Thing in a Dream)

You know when your dream is very sweet and you can feel it melting all over your sleep like ice cream and spreading through that wiiiiide black space behind your closed eyes, and some of this liquid dream starts leaking into your throat and you can taste it, so you're making eating sounds with your mouth as if you're being fed by a witch. That's the kind of dream I was having.

That's what my mum says when I'm chewing air in my sleep, that it means witches are feeding me! But it is just my sweet dreams I'm eating. So sweet that I don't want to wake up, I just want to keep sleeping down deeper into it. But she would shake me out of this dream and begin to spray the blood of Jesus all over my face and I would feel some of it splash into my eyes and blind me. Like she was doing now, shaking me awake. But there was nobody's blood in her mouth, only my name, and it was a small thing inside her throat as if her voice was in a very far place and it couldn't touch my name very well to hold it firmly. But I heard it. She called the name three times (like one of those how-many-times-did-I-call-you? times she does sometimes when she is about to tell me something heavy and she wants to be sure that my ears can carry it).

When I opened my eyes now and stared a question at her, she said, "Get up, pack a few things, we're leaving."

Leaving?

Where?

To where?

What is happening?

I listed the questions in that order but I didn't give them to her, they just stood inside my eyes, waiting for her to read them.

"Get up." Her voice had formed into a hard thing now.

I got up.

"Pack a few things."

Began to pack. I didn't know what a few things were so I just packed anything my hands touched. I wasn't looking, my hands were just doing. So I can't tell you what I packed, or what I was packing them into.

When I was done packing, she said, "We're leaving. Come."

I went, and we left.

Just like that. As if we were inside a dream, where you usually can't understand what is happening, and everything is shaped like question marks around you, swimming inside the middle of your dream, from one end of your sleep to the other, and you climb out on the other side awake, not really knowing what you had just dreamt about. That is how this thing felt, this thing that we were doing. This question-mark-shaped thing that my mum was making us do, that I couldn't ask about.

Why wasn't I allowed to ask questions? Doesn't she know that if you carry too many questions around in your chest, one day they'll burst into one big answer: death. Maybe she doesn't care if we die. She just cares that we leave. And we are. That is what we are doing. Like things in a dream. Only that this dream is not sweet. I can taste it on the under of my tongue and I want to spit it out and crawl back inside my ice-creamed dream that melts nice and soft into music.

That is how my mum and I left my dad's house. And that is how all the trouble that is this whole story I'm about to tell you started.