Rancho Tarzanadu: "House on Fire!"

     Miss Linda was having stress dreams. She had a very obvious one: she dreamed that Rancho Tarzanadu was on fire! She scrambled around, trying to put out the mounting flames, but they just kept growing larger and larger and more out-of-control by the minute. She tried throwing buckets of water on them, but that just agitated them to even more intensity, rising higher above her head like giant red, orange, and yellow ocean waves, roaring to crash down upon her. She felt terrified and panicked, and desperately alone, so dismally and sadly alone. In her dream, all her housemates were gone, enveloped by the flames, and she was fighting the raging fire with random and spur-of-the-moment actions that only seemed to make it all worse.

     Suddenly her father was there (even though he had died nineteen years previously). He knew exactly what to do, having been a fighter pilot in World War II, after all). He got the fire contained in no time flat, as Miss Linda looked on, frozen with fear. She hated to admit that she was afraid, but she was. Her fear fluctuated with various other emotions, like the dancing flames shooting up from the roof: anger, impending doom, peril, sadness, inexplicable giddiness, anxiety, grief, exhaustion. She pleaded with her father not to leave, but he implied (silently as the Mime in her kitchen) that he must go…he had other business to take care of. But he was available, if needed.

     She awoke, extremely relieved that Rancho Tarzanadu was not on fire, but also feeling more alone than ever before, and feeling overwhelmed for feeling so much of everything all at once. She wished she could go back in time, when everything was simple and she felt safe and protected. But time was forever marching forward, full of constant surprises; some good, some horrendous. She grabbed her stuffed rabbit (she’d had it since childhood) from her closet, turned her radio on low and fell back into fitful dreams while NPR played in the background, greeting the very early morning hours by announcing the new contagion and death rates, which were doubling, tripling, quadrupling by the day.