Wayfarer's Night Dream

Lettie bundled her clothes at the base of the elm tree and then walked out to the empty dirt road passing between her house and the Berlin’s. She stood in plain sight of Saree’s house and looked at it with curiosity and desire, wondering how to be included in its warmth and security, with its assuring domestic smells and steadfast daily pattern of living, with all its regularity and mundane comfort. 

Since Lettie had moved in with the Rasmussens, she had been drawn to the Berlins like a turtle to the sea, instinctively, certain that what it contained was necessary for her survival. Now the house was dark and asleep. At peace. Its massive slate roof and towering chimney gratified Lettie. The long and easy porch with its stuffed chairs and wicker tables, its cantilevered roof and railing with gracefully molded stanchions, these were details that seduced her with their suggestion of continuity and protective love. 

And because she longed for these very things, they also struck her as mocking affronts, the painted and polished thorns of cozy luxury that ridiculed her desire for substance. But what was the substance, the stuff, really? Were these the things that might soothe the growling at the pit of her belly, the aching emptiness between her thighs? If she could, she would ingest the very elements, the details and decorous architectural symbols of this family’s settledness, their rootedness, their dug-in permanence in the earth, and twist her own limbs between theirs, folding herself among their bodies, mother and father’s, sisters and father’s, daughters and mother’s, clasped together without beginning or end in one organism of synchronized breath; one organism, whole and warm and beating with life, passing its blood from limb to limb, from one body to the other, a fleshy web of symbiosis and satiated appetites, where one solitary consciousness alone and brittle could be subsumed, ingested by a larger purpose, a teeming honeycomb of life, pulsing with rich variety and interdependence as if the house were itself a life-giving womb.