These Dreams of You

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Upstairs beyond the door marked thirty-seven, in the morning shadows slowly bleached of night by the sun through the window, the little girl with the thumb in her mouth who never has understood western time retreats to the middle of the room, watching Molly unconscious on a bed in a small alcove in the room’s far wall. Sheba thinks to herself, She sleeps, or she’s sick — did I make her sick? and in her heart the girl finds herself back in Ethiopia, two years old again and on the precipice of abandonment again like when her mother — her other mother, with the blue-green hair — first came to get her. Since they have been here in this room — bewildered by western time, Sheba has no idea how long — the girl has stood at the woman’s side stroking her wet brow, wondering where her father and brother are, having almost come to believe they wouldn’t abandon her. Back in Ethiopia, at a moment when she nearly had a family, she remembers that her name was something else though she can’t quite remember: Zan? no that’s her father’s name, if he’s still her father. She returns to the bed and is stroking the arm of the young woman, who at this moment is a color more volcanic than brown, when the door of the room opens behind her.