Odd dream: A friend in need.

The other week I had this dream:

I hadn't seen my one friend from Buffalo in a while, and when I was up in a neighborhood on the north side of the city going to a new bar, my one lawyer friend from Missouri texted me that she was with her at a hospital and then going home, since she had a new place just a little bit closer to the hospital to make it easier on herself.

After lazily biking past some taller brick apartment buildings all up against each other and towards the front of the road during the grey afternoon weather, I next thing found myself on a dirt road in the country, a road that wound around with a bit of space after the road edge and a mild-looking forest beyond, and every once in a while a house or a driveway here or there.

Then, I was at a light blue house with a trailer put on it for an addition, towards its right side, in the middle of a dumpy clearing with tall grass towards its edges.

My one lawyer friend from Missouri and another friend I know through her, a businessperson from Missouri, come out to meet me, and I express my surprise that a house like this is so close to the city, that it's just tucked away like that.

I then say that I had seen these streets laid out on voter precinct maps that I was looking at, but I had no idea the neighborhood was like that, and somehow I know that at a certain time in their lives certain people choose to live in this neighborhood, since they're at a different stage with everything and like the quietness.

Our conversation feels like small talk, and we move into the house, which is sort of empty with dingy white walls and has dirty-looking, very light grey carpeting, and what furniture there is seems beat up and cheap like it was bought at a Wal*Mart or an office supply store, though here and there are swaths of blue-and-turquoise cloth hanging in S-curves from the ceiling, as if someone with taste had tried to do their best at an impossible project.

Then, they say my friend from Buffalo's doing all right, considering, just as she steps out from the hall to the bedroom, looking wan.

I ask if it's okay to look around - as if I don't know what's going on and I'm just visiting the house - and she says a quick look's okay, and I walk through the dirty and bare tiled kitchen with cheap light wood cabinets, and into the bedroom, which is dirty and resembles the living room, and has a few half-hearted swathes of blue-and-turquoise cloth in it.

Somehow, then, I'm sitting on the bed, and my friend is crying and she puts her head on my shoulder and says she never expected it, it happened so fast, but she's pregnant, then somehow from her phrasing here and there it becomes apparent to me that it's twins.

"It's all right, isn't it?", she asks me, as she just cries, and I know that she's not okay with her decision.

Then, we're out by the edge of a cornfield, all 4 of us, and it's dusk.

We're walking down some path that's on the slope of a small hill, with a dirt road on our left and to our right the cornfield and its hacked-off stalks at the edge and bare field beyond, and it's all growing darker.

Further up is a concrete bridge going over the road, and towards us comes this thin figure, a drawn (black) woman with crazy wide eyes where you can just see the whites of them from pretty far away.

My two friends from Missouri are walking much up ahead and she somehow passes them, and then she's by my friend from Buffalo, grabbing her wrist and saying sharp whispered things into her ear that scare her, and I know she's warning against the abortion.

Then, a small (black) girl comes in from the fields, and the drawn woman turns to her and says "Speak!", and I know that the woman has the expectation of prophecy from the young girl.

Then, the young girl says, "That is evil."

My friend from Buffalo immediately turns to me in horror with a deflated expression on her face, and as she does so, I see the drawn woman break character, and I know that she had actually prearranged the appearance of the little girl in order to extort money somehow from my friend.

Then, I wake up.