THAT MONTH

After five years of avoiding Covid, early in June I got it. I test negative now, but I feel worse--like I've caught a second bug. My best guess is, weakened by Covid, I couldn't fight off the flu that's going round. Basically the whole month lost. Feverish; I've been sleeping badly. Few dreams, unusual for me.

THAT DAY

Drink & snort hot brine, goldenseal & powdered walnut hull to sterilize my throat... Too tired to do much. Just read.

The classic Brit kids' story The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry by Rosalie Fry, inspiration for the film The Secret of Roan Inish. It's about Scottish legends of selkies--were-seals. In this case, seals in the family.

The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue, a historical novel on a bizarre train crash--engineers trying to keep to an insanely strict schedule sped through Paris and... couldn't stop. Roared right through the station at the end of the line to smash through the stone wall and plunge to the street, 20' below, killing a pedestrian.

THAT NIGHT...

I'm on an ocean liner off the Big Sur cliffs on the California coast--golden summer ridges dappled in dark woods. I stand at the bow looking out--we're headed northwest, angling away from shore. Just a few miles out, but already deep blue. Drops off fast, out here.

Out of the west, a long narrow cruiser. Shockingly fast. A navy ship. Literally navy, too--deep blue--good camouflage in this deep dark sea. She passes our stern, missing us by mere yards. Alarming.

Dead ahead, half a km away, a submarine surfaces. Collision course. Our liner doesn't veer. Does the pilot even see it? Run back from the bow trying to reach the bridge in time.

On the way I see no lifeboats. And I know this water: too cold for me to swim 3-5 km to shore. If the ship goes down and no one picks up survivors quickly, I'll die out here.

Before I learn whether we pass or collide, live or die... I wake.

• Stand at the bow: in The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry, the girl returning to the Western Isles. She eventually leads her family to resettle an abandoned islet, reuniting the human and selkie sides of the family.
• Ships collide, sub: I recently read Joan Grant's Far Memory and Graham Greene's A World of My Own. Both memoirs are full of shipwrecks--Titanic (iceberg), Lusitania (torpedoed), Rowan (multiple collisions!), Atlantique (fire), and Waratah (just vanished).
• Miss one ship to hit another?: I think the dream's confirming this is a second virus. My immune system fought off Covid in just a week or two, but it left me exhausted--unable to avoid the flu.
• Military ships: sadly, the dream also summarizes the current brinksmanship between the world's autocrats, playing chicken in Ukraine, Gaza, the Taiwan Strait...
• This nightmare echoes two from years ago:
  
  1. In Green Angels (left), I chased a squad of flying women in green bikinis--covert Navy agents--who were stalking, & maybe bombing Greenpeace vessels off Big Sur. (In the waking world, France had just actually bombed a Greenpeace boat in a New Zealand harbor).
  2. In Sule Skerry (right), I was on a freighter off the tip of Greenland that turned and headed for the rocks. The crew leapt overboard, but as they dove, they turned into seals. No point in any of us passing as human any more! I tore off my clothes and shifted too. I'd been a selkie all along.
  So there's a third option. Not live or die. Live, die... or transform.

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