Entry: 1
9 September 1999

I'm in my backyard with my brother Steve and a neighborhood girl. We're around the age of ten. We are waiting for my dad, my brother Brent, and my cousin Curtis to come back home. We're also expecting the girl who lives next door to come back soon.

Through the fence, we can see a neighbor pulling into the driveway. A couple of plump girls get out of their car and go into the house. Another car pulls up and another plump girl gets out. She's wearing motorcycle riding gear. For a moment I view the dream from her perspective. She thinks, why did my fat parents have kids when they knew they'd have fat children? I get a picture of her father in my mind. He's bald, red-faced, and big.

We hear yelling from next door. The father. He's yelling for the missing girl. We listen to the yelling and smile at each other because we know more than he does about her whereabouts. Then, I suddenly realize the yelling is coming from my house. I tell the girl, unbelievingly, "Your dad's in my house!" I then run up the stairs of the balcony and into the kitchen. He's yelling at my mom. When he sees me, he gives me a friendly smile. I don't buy it. I usher him out of the house, yelling nonsense words at him. What I say doesn't matter as much as how forcibily I say it. He backs away from me trying to explain as I continue to force him forward by yelling. When I push him out of the door onto our front porch, I spin the lock on the door to the 18 position, which means it's locked.

I return to the backyard. The neighborhood girl asks me something about planes, just as I'm watching a green one flying far overhead. As I watch it, it gets closer and closer, until it lands behind us. We go running towards it. I'm in front, running so quickly I'm a blur. The plane opens and I see two guys behind a long desk. I'm in my twenties at this point. There's another desk or two behind them with more people, but I don't pay attention to them. The man wearing the captain's hat tells me Brent and Curtis are dead.

Inside the square interior of the plane, I see Curtis' hand in the back left corner and Brent's hand in the back right corner. The captain starts to read a medical statement about still getting a small response from Curtis' hand as I dash over the desks and hold his hand. I see one of his fingers has a wedding ring on it, almost falling off the tip of his finger. His hand is wrinkled and swollen. The end of the hand is cut off, but not wrapped up or bleeding. A wire runs from it to the side of the plane.

The man behind the desk starts reading about Brent, but refers to him as "Pretty Boy," one of mom's nicknames for him. Steve, standing at the entrance to the plane with the neighborhood girl, snickers about this. The man notices I'm still holding Curtis' hand and tells me to hold Brent's, so I run across the plane and hold Brent's hand. He reads a medical statement about his hand being unusually moist and having weird bumps under the skin, which I feel. Steve explains that Brent always had unusually moist skin.

I'm then told by the other man behind the desk to leave. I dash over the desks again to the front of the plane and face the man with the captain's hat. He looks exactly like Curtis. The other man again insists I leave, explaining that they need to take off immediately. I tell the first man he looks incredibly like Curtis. He denies it with a laugh and smile. The third time the other man asks me to leave, I jump off the plane.

As I jump off the plane, I notice two bodies inside tubes filled with liquid. I shout through the still closing doors as the plane begins to take off, "Who are the other people?" As the plane turns, the man who looks like Curtis yells a German name out the side window. He starts to say the name of the second person, who is female, but I don't hear the name since the plane is too loud now.

I turn around. We're about ten years old again. Steve and the neighborhood girl are working on opening a gate kept closed by old, dried vines. When the gate opens, the voice of a cartoon narrator gushing with optimism exclaims, "The Secret Garden!" Steve and the girl rush into the gigantic yard. Its nicely kept lawn extends quite aways. In one corner, there is a rusted out playground set with the numbers 618 written on it. Earlier, I noticed these numbers were written at the end of our driveway, signifying that our yard was the entrance to The Secret Garden.

I joyfully run out onto the lawn, but stop. I say, "I've got to tell mom about what happened to Brent." As I'm leaving, Steve says to the girl, "He has to tell mom everything." I dash into the house and find mom sitting on the front porch. I go outside and see she's sitting in a metal car, one for a five year old. I'm in my twenties again. I see she's pretending to drive the car, steering the wheel and looking ahead of her intently. When she sees me, she stops and smiles. She says, to explain herself, "Someone must have wanted to keep this. I found it in the basement." She looks sad and longing for previous times. "You already know, don't you?" I say.