All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter

Venita had a dream. To these people who had followed the highways from the South, who had come from the cotton fields, the cane fields, the fields of rivers of rice, dreams were powerful. To them, waking life did not inform dream life. Dream life informed waking life. Dream life was filled with winged harbingers that swooped into waking life carrying messages that should not be ignored. Daytime dreams, waking dreams, were especially filled with harbingers. During the day, one was trespassing in dream life and was liable to be chased into wakefulness by something that was better left unknown.
    Venita, while trying to rest her eyes before going to Mary Kate’s, was swept into a waking dream. It was a winter night, and instead of grass there were cabbages in her back yard. Someone had forgotten to harvest them. Their growth stunted, they were gnarled fists, and Venita pulled at them, trying to uproot them, trying to feel that delicious ripping move through her body, taste the flavor of it in her mouth. But the plants were stuck to the ground. She hacked at them with a hoe, but instead of ripping free, the heads broke off cleanly and rolled through the yard. When she finished lopping the heads off from an entire row, she heard a noise coming from the beginning of the row. Venita thought she was hearing things, but the noise was clear.
    When she reached the beginning of the row it was daylight, and there was a baby where she had dug up the first cabbage. The baby was emerging from the darkness, white, colorless, struggling to reach the light. Venita pulled the baby out by a wrist. It did not tear from the ground, but slipped noiselessly into the world. The baby was a girl, and Venita placed her on the ground while she looked for something to wrap her in.
    She found nothing. All the cabbages had disappeared. She returned to the baby only to see her slipping away. Something was pulling her, and while Venita ran toward her, shouting, the baby sank quietly into the earth.
    The sound of Venita’s own screaming awoke her. She jumped from the couch like it was afire. She was so happy to be awake, to be dropped from the heights of her dream to the safety of her living room, that she felt like crying.
    She smelled smoke in the house. Venita ran to the kitchen to discover the pan of bread pudding she left baking in the stove had burned up. She had slept for almost an hour.
    Someone was knocking at her front door, and it couldn’t have been a worse time. All she wanted to do was get to Mary Kate’s.
    It was Mary Kate. She stood on the steps with Mary wrapped in a blanket and Dorene at her side. “I was worried ’bout you, you not showing up and all.”
    Venita stared at them. She was so surprised that she did not think to ask them in. “I fell asleep. I was just resting my eyes for a minute, just one minute—”
    â€œWhat’s burning?”
    â€œThat’s my bread pudding, burned blacker than a hat.” She asked Mary Kate and the girls to come in. “Pardon my manners,” she said. “You must think I ain’t had no upbringing. Come on in.”
    Venita was excited to have visitors. It was the first company she had ever had in her house. But she was too distracted to show how pleased she was. She was trying to push the darkness of the dream from her mind, to make her mind a blue and blank sky. But the darkness formed itself into a cloud that filled her thoughts.
    She had her company sit in the living room among the starched doilies, the cut-glass ashtrays, the figurines of dogs and cats. In the kitchen, Venita tried to scrape the bread pudding from the pan. It all came out except for about an inch that was stuck fast.
    â€œYou don’t have to do that now,” Mary Kate said, slapping the girls’ hands away from the ashtrays. “Come on and set.”
    Venita did not answer. She wanted to. She wanted to come and sit, but she could not move. The cloud in her mind was