Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond

of my bed, my clothes, my pots and pans. There’s something peaceful to me about New York City.”
    “New York seems like a strange place for a girl from Alabama.”
    “After Amanda Ruth died, Alabama never felt quite right. I saw a side of human nature I never want to see again.”
    “The murder, you mean.”
    “No. The stuff that followed. The locals were like sharks circling in for the kill. They wanted blood, humiliation. I was afraid to leave my house because everywhere I went, people stared and pointed.”
    I don’t tell him just how bad it got—that pastors preached sermons in which Amanda Ruth, Allison, and I were perverts and villains. One of the papers even ran an editorial with the headline “Protecting Our Kids from Lesbians and Gays,” as if gays were hanging out on street corners, lying in wait to convert innocent children. It bordered on mass hysteria; I felt as if I’d been caught up in some strange Kafkaesque plot.
    Then, a month later, there I was in New York City, stepping off the plane into the chaos of LaGuardia Airport, and no one looked at me. No one bothered me. New York City welcomed me in a way my hometown never would; they didn’t care who I’d loved or what I’d been accused of. For all they knew, I was just another New Yorker.
    “I’ve only been home a few times since then, but rarely a day goes by that Amanda Ruth doesn’t cross my mind. Is that strange?”
    I think of Amanda Ruth, her desperate desire to see China, the picture books she kept hidden beneath her bed with artists’ renderings of the Forbidden City, the mountains of Guilin along the Li River, the bright lights of Shanghai. Taped to the wall inside her closet, behind her summer dresses, she had a black-and-white photograph of the Three Gorges. In the photo, walls of stone reached toward a strip of sky, which seemed small compared to the cliffs themselves, and between these cliffs lay a narrow reach of river, flat and shadowed. In the foreground was a small dark blemish that we discovered only after the photograph had been hanging in Amanda Ruth’s closet for months. We took a magnifying glass to the blemish and realized that it was a sampan. Beneath its U-shaped cover, through which a bit of evening light shone, we made out a miniature figure—a man, standing upright, steering with a long slender pole. Amanda Ruth and I looked at each other in startled silence. The sheer size of the Gorges, and of the river itself, was something we could not begin to comprehend. After a minute she put the magnifying glass back in the top drawer of her dresser and said, “Well, it’s obvious now. I have to go there.”
    I was amazed by her self-assurance. Going to China seemed as unlikely to me then as winning the lottery or becoming president of the United States. “How will you ever get there?”
    She laughed. “I’ll fly, doofus.”
    The mist has thickened. As Graham and I head back to the bus, we lose our way. We take a path that looks identical to the original one, but instead of ending at the parking lot, it leads directly into the mouth of a cave. Only later does it occur to me that the rational action at this moment would have been to turn around, retrace our steps, and try to find the bus, which was scheduled to depart in half an hour. But I am attracted by instinct to the cave at the end of the path, as if we have arrived here by fate. The opening is just high enough for me to walk through without difficulty. Graham follows, bending deeply to enter. Inside, the ceiling is high. The cave is damp and cool, the dirt floor packed hard and smooth. The entryway allows a soft infusion of light, by which I can make out an old coal stove in the corner. A small bucket gathers dust by the stove. Graham moves into the light, plunging the cave into darkness. I can hear him breathing. He steps close to me. His mouth on my neck, his hand in the hollow of my back. And then he is kneeling before me, his hands trembling as he lifts the