Consciousnessstream Stories

He owns the house. Three stories, acreage, a river at the bottom of the hill. The deed is real. Nobody disputes it. The house is full of strangers who don't care. There's a girl in the front yard with an offer already made. A truck bed already prepared. The simplest thing anyone has offered him in a long time. He turns around to face the house instead. *The wine is still in the cradle. The door to the river is still there. The key has been in his pocket since Nevada.* **All he has to do is go in.** *Literary dream fiction | JREAMS series, Episode VII* *© K.M. Æsquire*

A man orders four bounce houses for his own birthday and never jumps on any of them. The siblings play on them all day. He watches from windows he installed himself - the kitchen window, the front yard, the peephole in the front door where he catches the tail end of something happening on the street that he wasn't part of. A childhood crush hanging laundry in the foreground. A daredevil behind a fence running tricks for a camera nobody asked him to set up. A neighbor in a tree mansion who asks for hash twice and gets it once. In between: a condo upstairs, a family that is his in every way that counts, chocolate-covered frozen bananas in the back of the cupboard, a phone call to arrange the pickup of bounce houses nobody over twelve touched. And twice - once near the beginning and once at the end - a small truck going up a mountain with his mom in the passenger seat and Patsy Cline on the radio. He was singing. Not well. But he was singing. ~~~ JREAMS - Episode VI K.M. Æsquire