These Dreams of You

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In the pub, one of Zan’s two remaining credit cards is declined. Later that night, with the little girl snoring next to him in the double bed while Parker sleeps in a perpendicular single bed, the father goes online to check the limit on the card and finds the bank has lowered it to below what he already owes. This leaves one card left with credit. Zan monitors as well, each time with that familiar knot in his stomach that he brought with him eight thousand miles across the Atlantic, the website that posts foreclosure dates.

Zan can’t risk lying in the dark thinking, because hopelessness will overcome him. To distract himself, he composes in his mind playlists for the radio show, as if Sheba could transmit them to the canyon an ocean and a continent away. After mentally compiling countless unrelieved hours of Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, Celtic Frost, Cradle of Filth, Carnage, Dismember, Revolting Cocks, Dark Tranquility, Morbid Angel and Kevorkian Death Cycle, Zan dreams of rats streaming out of every crevice of the house in death-metal mode the moment the family locked the door behind them on the way to the airport. A mosh pit of revelrous rats stampedes across his imagination.