Miriam Gershow
Dream Interpretation for Beginners
Running and running but from what? means your father didn’t love you or if he did it was
via a complex system of fist bumps and puns. Your teeth falling out means you regret
that time you were mean to Lara Mellon in 3rd grade for her stupid name and how she had
to stand out in the hallway for birthday celebrations because Jehovah’s Witness.
Suddenly falling means it may have worked when you were younger but you aren’t
fooling middle-aged men with your fake orgasms; they just don’t care. On stage for an
opening night performance but you don’t know any of your lines means your sister was
right when she told you your least attractive quality was self-righteousness. Naked in
public means that Jacob Leibstein, who you broke up with 20-years-ago does, indeed,
have a life as good as it appears on Instagram: successful and do-gooder law practice
(immigration!), hot shiksa waif of a wife and a pair of adorable, tow-headed girls with a
bent toward recessive genes. Can’t find your way out of house of endless rooms means
sometimes your therapist isn’t taking notes on that pad in her lap, she’s doodling the
same 3-d boxes she doodled in third grade (square square line line line) because you’ve
told the story of your mom leaving you alone in the house when you were only seven at
least six times already.
Buildings mean penises. Trees are penises. Top hats are penises. Long handled
broom, penis. Dustpan, vulva. Penises mean you want to fuck your father except if it is
your father’s penis and then it means all those nights you woke up in the dark, scared,
calling for your mother, and she yelled from her bed “Turn over and find a new position”
without getting up to see if you were okay and you feared your mother did not love you
either, which at 3:27am, the twenty-third night of this in a row–god, how long will this
phase last, your mother wanted to know–your father snoring next to her, a man who
could sleep through his own funeral, she liked to say, because it was came off like an
insult but he couldn’t prove it, she did not, in fact, love you. Though when she woke in
the morning, the daylight reset her as the daylight always did (it was your mother’s most
attractive quality) and everything would seem possible again, all of that nonsense of the
nighttime receding like a dream.
Survival Tips: Kid’s First Night of Sleepaway Camp
Yell loud jokes across the house about how you can yell loud jokes across the house
without waking your child. Yell should we have sex? Have sex with the bedroom door
open. Scroll through your phone in bed after to see if the camp posted photos to the app
where they said they’d post nightly photos. Get up when your husband says we should
change the sheets, pointing to the wet spot one or both of you is responsible for. Walk
around naked. Leave your vibrator out on the bathroom counter. Yell they said they’d
post photos.
Miriam Gershow
Miriam Gershow is the author of “The Local News: A Novel” and the forthcoming “Survival Tips: Stories” (Propeller Books, 2024). Her short stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction and nonfiction appear in Pithead Chapel, Craft, and Variant Lit, where she won their 1st Annual Pizza Prize.