My Grandmother by Justin Dobbs

It wasn't long ago. My sleep had been fine (almost telephone free) when, after a silver dawn had painted a pale light into my bedroom, I discovered the wild, crazy tiger. He was knawing on my socks!

It is enough to wake one up. Here I am now, in the lifeboat, on a fairly oily and cremulous sea, and mulling over my chances to arrive at a distant church although I can see its ancient spire above a hill. I have also placed my wild tiger into the lifeboat. The cat's tail seems to read my thoughts about the church and to navigate all at once.

My investigations of the island have been fruitful. My grandmother was a baker in town, and bakers, in this town, are very important. So much so that she had been given the only key to the town's only library. And so one night, when everyone was asleep or watching grandfather on television, my grandmother stole me past the bakery, past a yard for chickens, to a small, silver door on a blank, purple wall. Inside, it was madly dark, but she had brought matches, and a candle. My grandmother was pretty as a young woman, and dressed racily then as she does now. And so, as I crept forward in the dark, her hand pressed firmly to my lower back, I could smell the lavender in her clothes, in her skin, in my dreams of the tall, fabled church.

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Justin Dobbs has work in elimae, 3:AM Magazine, and Billy Sauce's Fortune-Telling Blog. He lives in Seattle and New York.