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Chapter Three: Once in a Blue Moon

The trunk creaks open, and it’s not mothballs or relics that rise up — it’s sleep.
Not the good kind. The kind that pulls you sideways, eyelids fluttering like flags in a storm.

I don’t know when the basement disappeared, but I’m in a bedroom now. Not mine. Not anyone’s, really. Just a box in the dark made of sheets and red glow.

I can see myself lying there. From the ceiling. Watching.
My body’s there, limp, not dead. But not dreaming either. The red nightlight pulses above the bedframe — the one I stole from Uncle Dean’s drive-thru convenience store. Neon flickering “OPEN” in reverse, burned into the backs of my eyes. That store was a cathedral of sin — I stole so many cigarettes, never a single bottle. That was sacred. That took more guts than I had.

The bed’s a mess: one golden spoon, still sticky with shadow. Three glass ashtrays, all full. One balanced precariously on the window ledge like it’s daring itself to jump. A torn towel on the floor. A cotton ball with a halo of blood.

Cotton fever — that hellish surge — I remember now. That’s what’s breathing beneath my skin in this dream. It’s why my hands look so far away.

There’s someone next to me. A lover, maybe. I know his name. I knew his name. I forget it here. He was in-between, going toward womanhood but still clothed in the husk of a man. I never loved him. Not really. But he drove me to Toledo, to the methadone clinic, and later, the Suboxone place, where the chairs smelled like old meat and peroxide.

He took me to a place once, a real place, so strange I thought I imagined it: