Dream

She has a dream that she has to cheat on him with an ex-boyfriend. The ex-boyfriend is carrying a baguette in her dream. A baguette, and he is wearing a navy blue crumpled plaid shirt and his face is crumpled too, like a dried teabag. Baguettes mean infidelity.

She has to cheat because the dream demands it. Sleep takes her by the wrist every night and makes her do horrible things to the people she loves with people she no longer loves but still loves in dream-time. Fluorescent acts of treachery she would never dream of committing in the day, she blinks out at night .

He is carrying a baguette and she knows this is meaningful. He won't wave it at her, (even here things are not so obvious), but maybe he pulls off a bite and shows her: crumbs gritty against his lips. Spraying her slightly, he says: 'I like bread.'

Even in dream-time, she senses that this isn't the most meaningful thing that he could say. Nor does it incite her to unfaithfulness. Nevertheless, she knows there will come a moment when the old scarlet letter will be pulled out of the knicker drawer (knicker drawer means knicker drawer).

Not that this is in the dream. In the dream, he repeats.

'I like bread'.

This time, it has taken on an ominous timbre.

In the way that you can tell yourself things when you're asleep but not enough to wake yourself up, she tells herself not to be suckered in by this new atmosphere of doom. But when he says it a third time, she's a goner. Three times a charm. Three times and tomorrow she will smell bakeries all day and won't tell him why.