Spirits.

It was not the contents of the dream that haunted me; it was the familiarity of it all.

Every crevice of the room felt to be lived-in, not just by its natural deterioration from years of neglect, but as though I’d been squatting in it for days on-end. The Sun slipping through the cracks of the ceiling made it all-the-more surreal; it was dusk and I didn’t want to be there. Perhaps this torn-up warehouse was never to be a final stopping-point, or even a pitstop, but nevertheless there was not an end in sight.

In the dream I looked around, as if I were waking up. I looked down to see clothes, tattered and worn, lamely hanging off my shoulders. I’d probably been dressed this way for weeks, months, who knows.

While most would look at the innards of this warehouse contemptuously, and turn up their nose at the notion of laying rest in a place whose stained-mattress had no lumbar support and the windows were shattered, I, being the optimist Mom had raised, just appreciated the space. It was hardly the foyer of the Biltmore, but it was spacious. Nobody who resided or passed through was allowed to be a stranger, nobody would sneak up on one another, and there wasn’t a single secret between me and the other passerbys.

But besides myself, there was but one resident of this modest dwelling. A thin white woman with a slender hourglass body and a cocktail dress (about as torn as my own clothes) sat upon an easy chair. Her hair was weathered and her upholstery was beyond repair, but she maintained an elegance that anyone could surmise to be a birthright. She was not of royalty but of wealth, and she’d cut away from that world (amidst a party with her boyfriend, no less) to run off into this backwoods shack to drink and love the remainder of her days away.

Her neck was hunched over, but in the dream I knew the contents of her face (though I could not recall where from). I knew them to be youthful but not childlike, provocative but not promiscuous. It was a face that could levitate the spirits of the most wretched of men. And here in this dream, that was me.

She looked up, and, with the smirk on her face, I could not begin to ascertain her motives for locking eyes with the likes of me. She got up from the chair, and walked over to me as I sat like a confused toddler, wondering what she’d have to say to me when she got over. I remained on the concrete floor, averting my gaze from her clicking heels to the glass bottles. I could neither remember nor read the labels on those bottles but I knew they were a part of the dread and anxiety that was dulling the nerves as I sat there cluelessly.

Finally, I heard her take the final step. I gave a passive glance, as if I were too lost in thought to acknowledge her. This did not seem to bother her. She lowered herself, leaned forward, and put her lips up to my ear, and whispered seductively: Times up, Clarence.

And it was then that I shot upward, drenched in an icy perspiration, whilst finally remembering her name, my tongue forming the words aimlessly in-between the heavy breaths: Luna Glow.

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This shut-eye fantasy acted like any other, slipping through the fingers of my psyche mere moments after collecting myself in those early hours. The time and place were first to go, then the inhabitants, the actions, and finally--even though I could feel them linger for a bit too long--the feelings that overwhelmed me in the dream vanished. I would go about my daily routine of brewing coffee and rereading the ever-lyrical poems of Dickenson, the ones my mother read to soothe me when my mind was in the weeds of my father's downstairs uproars of drunkedness. She had two collected volumes, but the first was all she’d ever read, therefore all I’d ever needed. Had he known, my father would not have ever allowed his son (at any age) to be associated with the arts, much less one with the femininity of poems.

Nevertheless I read on, the cares and neuroses of the forgotten dream melting away.

Until I peered out the window.

It sat there, bold, yet unassuming. A small package, which, I would realize upon inspection, bore a hauntingly familiar handwriting. “Clarence J. Sawyer,” and my ever-modest Mississippi address scrawled across the brown paper.

Resuming the deep breaths, I walked to the incense box, as I always did in the throes of anxiety, and pulled out the homemade concoction of cannabis that paid off my mother’s mortgage in her final years; five years she’d been gone now, and yet, it was as if she’d never left. Her furniture, her paintings, her records all remained as insignificant gatherers of dust, untouched by man or by thought.

My hands shook as I lit the joint. I figured that's likely to be the way the old woman would have wanted it, untouched by man. The last man who was not of direct kinship to Amelia Sawyer would use his hands not to conduct the gentility of a husband or father, but with the malice of a dishonest man. I took a drag and felt the scarred wounds of my back burn, reclaiming their space in my mind and personage.

I’d been back in the Sawyer household for going-on thirty years. “Not much, but gets the job done,” as the matriarch would say. And I can’t hardly think of those words in that sweet Southern-belle voice without hearing the hock-and-spit of a buzzed man, echoing from shadows and corners of the room that I still check.

Hoping to not get lost in what’d come-and-gone and reclaim the day, I put my attention back on the package on the dining-room table. I opened a pair of scissors and put the sharp-edge to the tape. The box and paper were old and worn, as if they were dug up this morning in a grave-robbery.

And it was when I slit the tape, and held my face close to the package that I realized not only what was inside, but what I had dreamt. My nighttime vision had not been pure fantasy, but an authoritative blend of fact and fiction. A sting occurred in my eyes, and I felt them become glassy.

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The decay and decline of familial purity had only continued with myself, thus perhaps the relevance of the name itself, Clarence J. Sawyer Jr. For whilst it had become a distant memory, I turned not to the high-headed academic promised-lands that teachers had always said to be in my grasp, but to the dives and the whores and streetwork that inhabited the small-town forays, deep in our nation’s hellish stomach.

It was upon losing fight after fight with my old man that I introduced myself to higher states of altered consciousness--much after my peers--just after the onset of adolescence. And while I cannot remember the brand of beer I do remember swallowing three cans nearly whole before staggering back to my family home and shoving my father to the hardwood floor and stomping on his beer-belly.

I’d drank before but never in such quantities in such a short amount of time. Sips at a party and swigs to impress the sluttier women of an elevated maturity, but this was different. For it was for none other than my own bloodshot eyes and feeling of unearned powerful rancour that motivated the downing of those cans and every other can, bottle and jug thereafter.

I gathered my things, enough to be gathered into a backpack and set off into the uncertain ambiguity of backwoods; and I would not (and still don’t entirely) know where I was to go for the next couple of decades.

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I yanked out the contents of the package, tearing off the proverbial Band-Aid, and groaned. It was a bottle; the liquid was clear and yet its aroma itself felt flammable. LUNA GLOW, read the label.

Clarity rang and reverberated in my cranium, a shell made hollow by the self-destruction of drink. The warehouse was not some statement of mind but of memory. I’d squatted in that wretched place for a number of months and the cocktail-dress woman and I had played. “Played” was certainly the right word for it, as neither of us truly knew what we were doing. Gathering the most reprehensible and lethal things we could steal and mixing it together to call it moonshine, we never once questioned our authenticity. And in placing myself in this memory I recalled why I thought her Christian name to be the one we’d given the moonshine.

I never learned that woman’s name. She was hardly a woman by way of age, but certainly was one in sharpness, both of mind and of tongue. We’d met and had plans to wed before I’d been picked up by authorities; and in my elevated world of constant inebriation, I’d let her name wither away in my memory in the following years of sobriety.

It was Mom who bailed me out and took me home. Aside from telling me of my father’s demise, she said very little on the ride back. Though I do remember getting teary-eyed after this revelation, not out of the far-gone patriarch, but an opening of gates that were long locked-away by the old man. My back burned in a way similar to today…

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I’d kept my book open this entire time, an untitled Dickenson poem which my eyes had scanned countless times remained present. Fingers trembling, I hunched my head over it in a fruitless attempt to reclaim the sanity that the bottle of Luna Glow had robbed me of. It was reprehensible, for I was not so much disgusted by the bottle’s presence, but knowing who’d sent it.

For the contents of drink had always elicited the most merciless of emotions in many men, and I was no exception. In a fit of rage, the distant (and ever-repressed) memory came rushing back - several decades prior I wrapped and taped the Luna Glow into the old package I’d found laying abandoned in the woods, and scribbled my own name and mother’s address on it, before dropping it in the nearest public mailbox. It must have gotten lost and delayed. A part of me always thought that she’d gotten it, and just never said a word.

I picked up the Luna Glow and walked to the kitchen-sink. Uncorking the bottle, the aura of a party long-over began to dance in my family home. The first teardrop, which had been resting in the corner of my eye for some time, began to crawl down my check.

What I was attempting to prove in this action, sending moonshine to my mother, was also lost on me. Perhaps it was a movement of spite, for allowing us to live with the wretched husband. Proof of capability (that she’d never in the first place doubted) was another possibility. Or maybe the rage I’d felt upon the alcohol hitting my stomach was reason enough for me to be angry and hateful enough to want to break her heart.

Shuddering as I took a whiff of the open bottle, I performed the act that must be done, tilting the bottle and letting its contents wrap around the porcelain sink and dip into the drain.

When the drain was clear of any visible liquid, I once again allowed myself heavy breaths, feeling the gates of self-induced tyranny close, and, after smashing the bottle into the green bin that sat on the porch, I went inside.

And without any real thought, I pulled out the second volume of Dickenson poems, sat where I’d sat just moments before, and opened to page one.