Ring Ring

Last night, I dreamt that he gave me two rings. Cheap ones, each encased in a plastic bubble prison. The kind you buy from a coin-operated dispenser of baubles, definitely, made in China. I used to see them--the coin machines--in convenience stores and outside the barely automatic doors of Shaw's supermarket. You could buy temporary tattoos for fifty cents. Tattoos were considered trashy by my mother. Even the fake ones were forbidden. I used to sneak into my uncle's bedroom, before it was my bedroom, and steal the quarters from the sock in his top drawer. I would buy the tattoos and apply them discreetly. Practice for when I became 18 and got one on my ass (now smudged) with a friend (friends, no longer) at a shady piercing parlor-come-bong shop on Christopher St on a Tuesday night because:boredom. The rings were silver bands. Fake. I can only remember this one. Tiny, square stones. Garnets? No. Garnets are red. January. They were the August green. My mother's stone, peridot.