Belly Dreams

  I used to dream about waking up on my 45th birthday and discovering I'm pregnant. Maybe it's a subliminal fear based on what I see when I look at myself sideways in a full-length mirror. That, and the fact that my daughter often pats my belly and asks if I've got a baby sister in there for her.
  I've been pregnant eight times--four miscarriages, four babies--so pregnancy is a major part of my past. After my first baby, I even decided to teach childbirth classes. I guess I had a pregnancy fetish, like some women have shoe fetishes (although I have that, too).
  Anyway, the recurring dream: I'm old and gray and my youngest kid is in middle school. I'm running around the house, frantically searching for my maternity clothes and a crib--which, of course, went to Goodwill a decade ago. Usually I wake up hyperventilating and avoid my confused husband for a few days.
  Once I dreamed that my 70 year-old mother-in-law was pregnant. Talk about weird. But then the next time I saw her, I checked out her belly and realized it doesn't get any better with age. Thank God for elastic waistbands.

Something's Fishy

  I love to shop in Korean Korner and look at the different types of fish on display in the back of the store. My kids hate going to KK. Between the fresh fish and the kimchee, the place is not for those with sensitive noses.
  "Just a minute, I want to get some shrimp," I told my restless brood yesterday afternoon as they gawked in horror at the glassy eyes of the flounder staring up at the ceiling from its final resting place--a bucket of dirty ice.
  "Gross, Mom." My seven-year-old held his nose as we walked by the carp in all their rigor mortis glory.
  "Just a minute, we need rice noodles," I said.
  We headed down the daunting noodle aisle with its thousands of colorful packages, each stamped with Asian characters we can't read. I go for the package that looks familiar. The fishy smell isn't much better near the front of the store. The whole place smells like low tide.
  "But I don't want shrimp for dinner," my youngest complained. He didn't relax the pincher grip on his nose the entire time we were in the store. "Why do we have to come here?"
  "This place has the best prices on fish," I explained, feigning patience.
  "I think she comes here to torture us," my oldest opined.
  "No, I just like to look at the fish." I smiled at the Chinese cashier who rang up our items.
  "Then why don't we just visit an aquarium, Mom?"

Springtime Surprise

  "It's just weeds," Julie said.
  "It's too pretty to mow down," Anna whined.
  Julie drove the John Deere lawn tractor into position at the edge of the field. "You know we have to cut it down. We have to find it before they sell the land."
  Anna turned pale. Julie knew she remembered. She put the tractor into gear and drove forward slowly. The waist-high weeds vanished beneath the blades and shot out the side in a cloud of wet green fluff.
  "Be careful!" Julie shouted to Anna as her younger sister walked in the tractor's wake. She held back a comment about watching for snakes. The word alone would send Anna into hysterics.
  Julie steered the mower toward the far edge of the clearing, all the while keeping her eyes peeled for something that didn't belong in an overgrown meadow. Something she and Anna had left in a snowstorm ten years ago.
  Anna's simple mind assumed it would have melted away with the snow, but Julie knew better.
  The mower blades clogged with the damp vegetation after she had cut down half an acre. Julie cut the mower and raised the chute to kick the debris free.
  Anna walked over to help her. She saw it first and started to scream.
  A human skull was lying face-up on the ground, the mouth and eye sockets encrusted with dirt.
  "We found it," Julie said.

Invisible

  I've never thought of myself as a transplant or even a refugee. Girl from the Bay Area spending her single years in Beirut right after the war. I rented a basement flat in the nicer part of town where the buildings were still functional, though missing a few walls--maybe a roof--compared to the rough side of town where the piles of rubble were inhabited by opium addicts and feral dogs.
  I could pass for Lebanese with my dark hair and eyes, as long as I didn't open my mouth to speak. Men on the street would smile at me with a smug type of satisfaction, pleased that my eyes were the only things visible through my veil. I was invisible like every other female in the city, but at least I could leave my flat without a male warden--I mean, escort--like my suffering sisters in Kabul.
  Inside my unfurnished home, I wrote feverishly, trying to capture the essence of Beirut in my novel, trying to see inside the minds of the middle-aged women who had been small girls when the bombs fell. I often took my binoculars and stared out my only window at the sides of half-standing buildings, electrical wires like giant black spiderwebs woven between the crumbling walls. The electricity brought a sense of normalcy to the Lebanese people. Too poor to rebuild, but not too poor to give up their color TVs.
  What would it be like to find happiness in these ruins? I wrote, trying to imagine my main character as complacent, yet resourceful. Like me, I suppose, only fluent in Lebanese.
  I headed out to the street market, wordlessly exchanging coins for bread and vegetables, smiling, nodding, and pretending to be invisible like my characters.
(Photo credit: Beirut, before and after restoration.)