This segment is drawn from from the audiobook of “Little Weirds,” read by the author, courtesy of Hachette Audio.
Dear Ms. Slate,
It has come to our attention that you recently created a dream in which you were waiting in line for a sandwich and that this was the whole dream.
As if that were not enough, there is a concerning report that your subconscious also produced a tensionless seven-hour dream about watching an airplane land during the day and that, again, this was all that happened. There was not even a sunset or a sense of where the plane was landing, and, apparently, the message of the dream was Nothing cared that nothing cared.
Really, Ms. Slate, this is starting to feel difficult.
To be clear, nobody is asking for you to go back to Dracula disguises himself as a frog and waits at the end of the bed for you and only you, and obviously you go right up to Frog Dracula, because “frogs indoors who don’t run away and frogs who only want to be friends and sit at the edge of the bed are a real stroke of luck,” but, then, right when you get to the frog, he turns back into Dracula and you are fooled into being killed by him, and he is laughing at you because he tricked you, and, just before you die, you realize that you actually hate the idea of being tricked more than you hate the idea of dying, and you also realize that you are afraid of “getting yourself sucked out of yourself” by a man who is dressed in a tuxedo, which is usually an outfit for a classy man at a fancy party, but, really, Dracula is just vain and thirsty, and there is no party, and he is nothing but a bitchy, life-drinking, life-draining liar.
There is no internal conversation suggesting that we go that route again.
Nor are we inclined to revisit You are an archeologist, and you are wearing all khaki, including a khaki explorer-hat thing and bad, long shorts with crotch puff, and you are at a flea market/book fair that has been set up in a school gym in England in 1970, and you stumble upon an artifact from the “way before past,” and this artifact is a pencil sketch of a staring woman, and then you look closely and realize that it is you—like, it’s your soul—and the message is vague but far from positive about your lifetime(s), and there is a sourness or curse regarding romantic stuff, and the curse is attached to your interlife spirit, and the image sends something that feels like “the energy of bile but not actual barf” from the picture up to your terror-frozen face and gaping mouth, and you wake up so rigid with fear that your body feels like a bunch of found objects that are the following: parts of a broken rocking chair, old spoons, and chains from the swings on swing sets.
I think we can all agree that, if that’s our only other option, then we should just shut this whole thing down.
And, to be totally frank, we can’t even find the language to address You go into the first-class section of an airplane, and a man who represents an amalgamation of all your exes is somewhere on the plane, and you do not have a ticket for first class, and you find that the seats in first class are not seats but normal-sized brown plastic beds with white sheets, and you do not have a ticket, but you still get in one of the beds and pull the covers up and hold the top of the covers between your teeth, and you feel the linen in your mouth, drying up the parts of the mouth that it touches so that it would be too painful to speak, and then you casually and completely go to the bathroom in the bed, you poop in the bed with a neutral attitude while lying flat on your back with a dry, linen-stuffed mouth. We can’t, as they say, dignify that dream with a response.
While we’re not quite at the point of ending your dream-life experience, we do need to have an honest discussion about this upsetting situation. The laziness and the deeply boring nature of the waiting in line for a sandwich dream is simply not something that we can tolerate, and it would do us all a disservice to sweep it under the rug. The airplane landing during the day dream is discouraging, especially after all we’ve been through. The airplane first-class movement dream—as it has been labelled internally—has understandably caused great alarm and sadness.
Please come in and see us at your earliest convenience so that we can dialogue about this.
Sincerely,
The Committee for Evening Experiences
P.S.: Speaking of sweeping things under the rug, I don’t think you’d hear even a peep of objection if we were to have a repeat of Rug turns into a carpet of flowers that are alive, and you can wear the whole thing as a shawl, and new blooms keep popping, even as you casually walk through a cocktail party at the house of a nice older woman who supports your work. There have also been numerous requests for You are in the passenger seat of a van, sitting on the lap of a real dog who is the size and style of Barkley from “Sesame Street,” and he is sitting like a person, and you are on his lap, and he is hugging you because he loves you, and you are sharing a seatbelt, and it is the time of year that is the seasonal bridge between spring and summer.
This excerpt was drawn from “Little Weirds,” by Jenny Slate, to be published in November, by Little, Brown in the U.S. and by Fleet in the U.K.
