Dead Girl Dream
February 7, 2011
You know how it is sometimes in dreams. You start the dream in the middle of a situation in progress and you just try to figure out what to do based on what sense you can make of it. So maybe I should have handled finding myself with this dead girl a little differently, but I was working within the limits of the situation.
We were in a well house, which I will explain for the sake of young city folk. Before rural people had running water, they had a wide pipe sticking up in the yard and that pipe had water at the bottom, many feet down. Often there’d be a big spool with a handle on it over the mouth of the well so people could reel a bucket up and down to get water. And really sophisticated folk built a little shed around their wells so they could get water or do laundry or whatever out of the rain.
So I was in this wellhouse looking at this dead girl on the concrete floor, and she was propped against the wall, her head in a cloth sack and sagging to one side, cold cold cold and whiiiiiiiite. I got the feeling she was 22 years old. She was wrapped in plastic and tied in twine in such a way that it almost looked like a strapless evening dress. Maybe she’d been hanged.
The well house had a concrete floor but the well itself was just a hole in the floor. I’ve never actually seen one like that. So I’m standing there wondering what to do about this, run call the cops or what, but it’s pretty obvious something was in progress here so maybe I should just finish it. She’s here, she’s roped to a pulley, somebody obviously meant to drop her into this well. It’s not clear where I am or if anybody else is here or who I’d go to for help, so I yank the rope. It pulls her off the floor and drags her over the well hole and I let go. She sinks like she’s heavy.
And now that I think about it, the structure itself was more like one of the reconstructed buildings at Town Creek Indian Mound, in that there was sun shining through thatched roof and eaves and the entrance was kind of like a snail shell – it was a hallway that looped around before it allowed you inside.
Immediately I stared having regrets. Nobody’s going to be able to drink from this well now. I start to wonder if this is my grandmother’s property, and if I will live here again, and not have access to water because of what I’ve done.
Then I go to leave. I notice water leaking from the floor in places. As I reach the doorway to outside, I step and feel the ground move, flail and catch myself on the doorframe. The floor under my foot was a piece of plywood floating on the water of the underground spring. “I was almost just like the dead girl,” I thought. As cold as it was, I could see myself being immobilized by the water, and the plywood settling in over my head, and not being able to get out. There were a couple of other bad places in the floor like that I noticed, and I made a mental note to warn people about them.
Maybe somebody’d just pulled her out of the well, and I made the wrong assumption about what to do.
Those buildings at Town Creek had dead people in them. The indians there lived with their dead.
