I sleep like a pharaoh wrapped in layers of latter-day percale, my hands crossed over my chest. In my recurrent dream, I live in a stone house bordered by lawns that slope down to the sea, a lush acreage littered with scrub pine and granite boulders. Two lions loll on the grass. Their eyes are the same color as the golden sunshine. They squint in rapturous serenity, covertly noting my approach, tails slapping idly in the grass. I stroll toward them, holding a house cat in my arms. I appear nonchalant, but my heart plays hopscotch on my ribcage. I never awaken from this dream. It is simply relinquished each time and revisited, as if it were encoded in my cells like my propensity for solitude or preference for vanilla.

  Cat leaps soundlessly. Her molecules elongate and arch into a rainbow of striped fur, white underbelly a streak in the darkness. She shivers with urgency and soars from the bed through a veldt of air to the windowsill. As the birds gather on the telephone lines, she is genetically urged to chronicle their chat-up of the sun.

  Pushing off my mattress with her back feet, she bounds through space, her radar tuned to their feathered transmitters. The bedspring jitters as she vaults. A shower of her energy rains down on my sleeping form. The sensations lift me upward to the zone, but heavily, as if my dense flesh were a sarcophagus for my spirit. Supine in this secret place, in this space-time between waking and dreaming, not unlike the flight-capsule between the divided worlds of bed and bird, I feel strangely authentic. It is a familiar tunnel, a bridge, a locale that is nameless, a nothing between somethings, like a forgotten dimension.

  I rise to this place with my eyes sealed, half-clinging to the fading images of the dream, half-roused by the feral chirrup in Cat's throat. A man's voice as sinister as the ack of a semi-automatic rifle breaks through the trance. "No!" it hisses.

  Cat's small body stirs on my windowsill, making the vertical blinds swagger drunkenly. From her second story perch, she peers down at the ground floor patio behind our building, the source of sounds.

  "Bad! Bad!" the voice resonates, taut with fury. I feel the shaming of its tone push at my skin like bony fingers.

  "BAD DOG!" it brays and then, after a sliver of silence, a blunt thud thumps against flesh, explodes into a yowling, plaintive screech that perforates the night. The air is tainted with pain, like swill tossed into the wind. My brain contracts as if a case shot has exploded between my ears. Bile rises in my throat, blocks my breathing. Involuntarily, I segue into parallel zones. Synapses crackle, collide, and mangle in the shrapnel of recall: my mother slumps to the floor grimacing from a blow, bleeding from her choices; the basso profundo of my stepfather's rage deafens my receptors; my fingers submerge in dishwater and trace the promising edge of a butcher knife beneath the suds; in baby-doll pajamas, I cower beneath an oleander bush and watch headlights circle the block; my roily blood bludgeons my temples--the migraine of childhood. I summon the lions, but they drowse with vacant eyes. In the familiar, I do not move.

  The dog whines softly at daybreak. Even the birds keep silent. Cat prances in cadence to the tiny yips, the shadow of her agitation silhouetted against the graying of the sky. Then, all is quiet. I breathe again, surfacing.

  Slowly I get up, move to the window, and seek Cat's silky coat with my fingers. She hunches her spine and purrs as I gaze down at the young Doberman crouched below. I lean my forehead against the mesh of the window screen to make out his details.

  He is alone, tied to a wooden fence with a heavy rope. His head, a sleek mahogany knob, begs to be fingered and lies between his paws. His stare focuses on the closed patio door where his master dwells. The perfection of the morning coolness on my raw face chafes at my insufficiency. The achromatic light offends my eyes. I long for a leonine retribution that will not come.

  "Good dog," I whisper through the funnel of air that separates us. My words twitch in his pointed ears. I cradle Cat's warm body to my neck, hugging her and myself with one arm, an epiphany of consolation.

  "Good, good dog," I croon to us all.

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