Evelyn's door is original, like Clyde's, but a humid glow is cast from the textured window she installed in the upper half of it. On the yellow bubble glass, words are stamped there with the same white decal used to display the name of a private eye on a similar door in every film noir of the 1950s: Room Nine. The door doesn't make a sound when it opens, its hinges oiled with the cells of the Gray Family's heated skin having undulated behind it all summer long.

Every day in this room is the first day of spring; the pang of sadness as she calls her best friend to tell her about her first kiss; the hardening of his heart as his father left for the last time; and all other turnings of the tide that have forced humankind to decide who they're going to be today, what the world will be when life is over. Her subconsciously growing ivy creeps under the bed and ascends the walls, choking peeling wallpaper, and the leaves stiffen with every way things could have been.

The green shadows of the dusty room are brushed with a pinkish haze from a stained glass window behind her headboard. The bed is covered in a mess of quilts made by every loving grandmother over the dark chenille-tufted bedspread. The pink velour of the heavy drapery frames unevenly the other windows filmed in some nameless brown botanical grit. The rafters above are decaying and threaten to collapse between their bolts, the same as her eyes threaten to burst into the salted waste of all goodness in the world to the poor placement of a joke.

mapping the unmappable

As Room Nine settles to silence tonight, our dreams are caught in it's webs of ivy and held there like dew. Every second as important as the ones we spend awake, if we pay attention while we're dreaming, we could move life backward. We could wake something within from an ancient slumber.