Always the woods, in her dreams that's where she was. And they were lovely, dark and deep.

In a dress that wasn't hers, with hair like Morticia Adams but blonde. Impossibly blonde, bleached and fried and splitting.

Dirt under her fingernails, holes in her socks, mosquitos all around. Her lips were chapped and cracking and she had sores in her mouth.

But it was cool in the forest and darkly green. It always seemed to have just rained, the soil moist.

These are the images that came back to her long after her alarm clock, long into the dreary daily routine. When drowsing on the train, unable to really sleep because of all the strangers and because she might miss her stop, the fleeting rememberances would come back to her then. In the rumbling black stretches of the subway, the world beyond the window grime was always the woods from her dreams.

She leaned her head against the glass and her breath misted the pane. She had several more stops until she was home, and then a walk few blocks more to home. Her apartment, her cat, dying plants, frightening news, inane sitcoms, crap food and a date with her fingers before something like sleep. Sleep and a return to the woods.

Her own hair was short and mousy. "Brunette" is the fancy word for it. She closed her eyes on the train and it rumbled through the earth beneath the city. Between stations it was dark and the passing shadows of the tunnel walls poured before her bleary eyes. Her breath bloomed and receded on the glass.

She is in the woods, and her dress is ridiculous, a tacky blue babydoll outfit that makes her look like Alice in Wonderland. It's marred and muddy from the woods. It is polyester and it itches, it makes her sweat. There in the distance is a small thatch roofed house.

The next station emerges and the train breaks, squealing. People come and go and she has to make room for a young mother with her brood. She's pregnant and holding a baby in one arm, holding a little boy by the hand. Fortunately this guy gets up and gives her a seat. The boy stands between her knees.

He looks across to her with wide empty eyes and the train lurches and shudders back into the tunnel; the black and the forest is there again.

The little hut is trashed inside, furniture splintered, shattered ceramics, cloth torn to rags. There is slop on the floor, old food or old vomit; it's hard to tell. An overturned kettle in the hearth, rotting onions. Clawed marks as wide as her shoulders. And then she hears the rains return outside, and she is trapped here in this place.

The little boy watches across the train and she tries to smile at him. He doesn't respond and she gives up, rubbing her temples. It is raining outside. The train emerges from the tunnels, shooting out onto an elevated track and she's floating inside it. Grey and rainy in the city. No more tunnels, no more forest. But the rain seems to have followed her from her half-dream.

At her stop she leaves, feeling the child's eyes on her the whole way. He even turns to see her her as the doors close and the subway pulls away, his small face smaller and smaller and gone.

She makes it home, her cat complains and rubs her ankles. Her phone is blinking and the messages are all the same; her mother, her ex, bill collectors, the heavy breather. His was the last and she knew it was him from the familiar thick gurglings. For the past few weeks he had started calling and she was simply too exhausted to do anything about it. She didn't encourage him and she'd actually never heard him live. But lately these raspy breathings on her voice mail. Sick, but it was attention. Her ex just wanted his things: when would be a good time? When indeed. She was too tired to deal with any of it. Cat food in the bowl. Passing out on the couch with the tv on, in her underwear and her tanktop and soon she was in the cool woods again, in the rain, in that house with the broken windows and the shattered furniture.

The dress was frilly and in the way, but she couldn't seem to get it off. She looked around and licked her dry lips, sniffling; she was catching a cold. It was damp in here, musty and moldy. the rain fell heavily, opressive, making everything outside either muddy and black or vibrantly green, lush and cold. There were beds, three of them, just like from the storybooks. And the frames had been destroyed, the matresses ripped open, scattered and befouled. It stank. She sat in a corner and hugged her knees, shivering and waiting for the rain to stop or for the bears to return.

And that was her dream, that was always her dream. Lately at least: in the woods, in the rain, the house, the wreckage and the chill, waiting for her bears to come home and to find her. It was all she saw in the night when she slept. Her mother thought she was just stressed and that going to confession was the usual answer. She brought home beer and that didn't help. She just slept longer and dreamed the same dream until her cat licked her face in hunger, her cat that she couldn't remember getting anymore. And her plants in the window turning brown and brittle, day by day.

At least she had a view. She lingered in the window and drank and until she felt self-conscious. Her breather might be someone in one of those other open windows, he might be watching her. She didn't see anybody else in any other window, but the thought remained and she sat back on her couch.

When the phone rang late one night, past her mother's bedtime, she knew it was him on the other line. Noone else would call, who did she know that would call? She didn't even need to say hello. She didn't say anything and they stayed on the phone like that while she walked over to the window. He swallowed noisily and huffed into the phone as if struggling with something. She listened for a while and then sat on the floor, pulling her cat into her lap and she told him of her dream.

"I can't sleep. No, that's not it, I sleep and I guess I sleep fine, but I always wake up tired and I keep having thing same dream of being in these fucking woods.. Like fairy tale trees and everything.. and I don't know. It's raining and I'm in this hideous outfit. And I'm waiting for the end to come, I've made a mess of things and I'm just waiting for the bears to come eat me," her breather hung up on her and she didn't hear from him for a week. But the dreams continued, and the house there in the woods fell to ruin more violently each time she found it. Doors wrenched from their hinges, floorboards split and smashed through. It afforded less and less shelter from the rains but there was nothing else and nowhere else to go when the downpour fell. Just mud and muck and chill.

A man moved in across the hall, she saw him unloading his things with the help of some of his friends. She did not make it inside soon enough,

"Hey there! You live there? Sorry my stuff is all piled up here in the way - just moving in," his smile was broad and he stated the obvious with a warm, easy-going manner that put her on edge. She nodded and locked herself into her apartment. When her breather called she told him about the new guy, then some more about her dream. It was confession after all. He called and grunted into her ear and she listened before talking, and then she talked until he hung up. It happened naturally like that for a while until she began to look forward to it, the human contact. Sleeping on the train, talking on the phone, walking softly by the door of the apartment next to hers.

It was during one of these sessions, after he was done and she was talking and crying as she sometimes did, that he interrupted her, in a wheezing flabby tone,

"Why don't you just go talk to him?" She hung up, then. That was too much. And she didn't answer the phone after that. She unplugged it after that. She drew her shades down and slept alone with her cat.

Eventually the house in her dreams fell to rubble. She sat beside what was left of the chimney in the rain and coughed and sneezed. No bears ever came calling.