I dreamt last night that I lost Harrison. We were sitting in my Honda Coupe exchanging glances and soft words, not knowing it would be my last and as it started to rain I just figured it was the time-worn pattern of weather, not a thick wet shield that drenched the Crescent City in a goldfish bowl-like flood. We managed to cling together despite the rising of the dark, dirt water all around us; the cars, stacked neatly in row upon numbered row, submerged evenly, then the streetcars, then the first floor, then the second — water even filled up the cages in the Audubon Zoo. In my dream we both found refuge on Monkey Hill — I remember that, the highest spot in the city — and I could see from where I stood the spire of Saint Louis Cathedral — and the more I spoke to Harrison the more he sank and the more the cathedral looked dry and welcoming, the soot and sin scraped off Decatur and Bourbon like it had gone through a full-service gas station. When I awoke in my fevered drenched four-poster, a faint halo of Harrison's crown sinking into the tar colored water dovetailed in my mind's eye and with a throaty taste of peanut butter from the night before, stuck somewhere in my neck, and I gasped.
Image Source: 'The naked young man sitting by the sea' (1836) by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin; Musée du Louvre, Paris
