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There was a college that I really wanted to go to. I was too old, but I’d managed to con my way in, and was going to a class. The class was called NLR, and had a logo and a team like an airplane company, with a shooting star in the ‘R’. The professor knew me, and I was a TA, or mistaken for one. The class was about LLMs. I enjoyed it a lot. The class moved classrooms, and I lost track of them. I was trying to find them, and stumbled through a bunch of rooms with various different art exhibits, where students were painting and sculpting, and it was beautiful. I picked up a japanese painting brush, and the tip was still wet, but not dripping, just not fully dried. I put it in my pocket. I ran into the headmistress of the school, and we had a meeting which was like an admissions meeting, and my mom went with me, and she was on drugs for some reason. After the meeting, I tried to convince the woman that I’d be good in the school, and she called me heavy, and said I must get it from my mom’s plaque, which she got from the drugs she was on, but was very no-nonsense, and I wasn’t offended. She was walking me to the classroom where the class was, and we were walking over several treehouse structures, and it was important, but I was having fun. Then, I looked in the distance and a lot of noise was coming from a skyscraper building at a different city, and cars were being ejected from it, and sprinklers and alarms sounding, because a missile had just hit the top of the building. We both froze, but then jumped into action. She said “12 o’clock” meaning there were more headed towards us. A police car drove from the city right to nearby, and said over the loudspeaker that we were in danger. I started running, trying to get out of the treehouse section to try and find a bunker, and my eyes went to the sky, where there were many, many, thousands of missiles coming for us. It was sunset. I was pretty sure I was going to die.

There were large groups of girl students. The administration from a competing school was trying to accomplish something. We spread the news that for each individual in one school, they should be paired with someone from the other school, and then invented the buddy system. I was in the backyard of a childhood home, and there was a swingset. I reminisced with my mother about why she’d let us have plastic balls to play with, like the kind you could buy from Walmart, as they were such a hassle, and ended up dirty or unplayed with. We noted that there were pools of dirty water from previous rain at the start of the slides, and the balls would roll in them. I met my competitor and we were training to kill each successive replacement. The house was for sale. My competitor, when I made myself known, was a larger “kid” than I was, with an unbothered air, and they ran across several states, and I looked at a map that showed the United States but reminded me of Alaska, with the states that they ran through lit up white on a grey-beige background. The yard had a valley into a creek, but was green. There was a point at which I was lingering around a lecture, where the female students were grouped, and I felt as though I was staff, or a lifeguard. The students were in college, but I worked there, as a kind of student leader. The buddy system was intended to protect the students from the real threat, sexual assault, while the administration was warring over the trivial competition between them.

I was in a large facility with other people I knew, mostly kids. There was an invading force, who had taken over and were coming to capture us as prisoners. They weren’t completely unreasonable or brutal, more a force of organization, a type of parental knowing-better, and they believed themselves to be bringing God’s will to people of a lesser status, us. We were in a hall waiting for them to approach, and there were several rooms, like in a church, and I picked out some of the children that I trusted the most and that I liked the most, who would create the most sympathetic storyline, and we all went into the back-most room, and they sat on a row of bleachers and I started writing on the whiteboard, teaching them about God. I was also a child, I think I hoped this would make us appear sympathetic to the invading forces. The invaders worked for the Chinese government. I was very worried that if we appeared to put up resistance, then deadly force would be used. At one point, I was one of the soldiers that was invading, and the commanding officers were willing to murder and sacrifice others if they didn’t cooperate. There was a large river that had needed to be crossed, with soldiers’ supplies strapped to their heads as they swam. Then I was sitting on a long bench, looking at the other soldiers, though I knew that I could also get in trouble, that I might be found out as not obedient to the cause. Perhaps I started as a soldier and then was found out to not be loyal or effective and was moved to be kept with the children. In any case, eventually the soldiers came and I went out of the room where I was teaching the other children and the invaders did processing, and handcuffed all the children and took away their belongings. I had a stuffed Eeyore, and I bargained with the one who was processing me, showing them how important it was to me, and they let me keep it, but gagged me as well, and it was miserably uncomfortable, and I kept gagging/almost throwing up because I couldn’t breathe well. My movement was stunted, but I was also surprisingly free, but I had to be careful not to draw attention to myself because I was a prisoner. I went downstairs, moving carefully and holding onto Eeyore, and walked around a mostly-empty supermarket, except the sushi counter was full of sushi.

I was living in a place that had mountains. I was living in a communal kind of group home, with others, but I was bitter about it, and wished that I could live on my own. There was a great fire coming, and we were preparing for it. The fire would come and wipe away everything that existed in the valley, because of the grass, and how flammable it was, so we needed to make our way up into the mountain, where there wasn’t grass, only rocks, and shelter in our bunker when it came. I was trying to find my cats, to bring them with me, but was having a lot of trouble. They would change, or slip out of my hands. I was gathering all of the cats I could, and I was late, because I was staying behind in the house in the valley trying to find the cats to bring them so they wouldn’t perish in the fire. I found three, one which was a calico with a tortoise pattern, one which was orange and seemed to also be a chihuahua, and one which was long and perhaps yellow. There were cars that were supposed to bring the group to the bunker in the mountain, but they left without me. So I started walking. I went into a store where I was looked down on by the employees, who seemed to be friends, and they were females, and were gently mocking me, but mostly they didn’t care about me, and thought I was awkward. I left and found someone who would bring me and my cats to the mountain, they were taking a shower in a glass corner of a large skyscraper building and had two heads, and were distracted and wouldn’t come with me, but then I found someone who would take me in their car, and we drove up into the mountain and met up with the rest of the group.

We were all divided into two rooms, with a passage between, and everyone started to prepare for the fire to come through, and I put on a podcast, and I was trying to look for my cats, the ones I couldn’t find, in hopes that someone else had grabbed them and brought them along, and I was grieving because I couldn’t find them. I needed to brush my teeth but the fire was getting closer, and I asked the person who was managing the room I was in if I could dart out to the bathroom for just a moment to grab my toothbrush. They were reluctant but said yes, but if I wasn’t quick enough they’d shut the door. I darted out, grabbed my toothbrush, ran it under the water in the bathroom sink for just a moment, and while I was out I looked down the hallway into the valley and saw the terrible fire coming at such speeds, on a vision of the city, dark, with purple haze of smoke rising from it, like it’d been razed, and I found myself curious, but also in awe and terrified. I could see the glow of the fire approaching and knew it was here imminently. I went back in the room, quickly, and tried to help prepare for the fire to come through by barricading the door, sealing the cracks around the edges, locking it, but my exit had left us unprepared and the fire arrived, and so we had to hold it shut and withstand the heat as it seared through the edges of the door while continuing to try and shield ourselves and barricade against it flying open. Then it passed, and I exited the room, and I had disdain for the people I was with, but grateful that I had made it, and I was also struck with curiosity that the fire would come in such a methodological manner, in a line, and then once passed through be gone, and wondered how many people lived or if they died without the bunkers, and I knew that we would have to do this again next year. I looked out over the city and it looked exhausted. I looked the other way and saw the other side of the mountain, and thought about the people that still had to endure the fire.