She dreamed in color.

She dreamed in color. Many don't. The recall of the dreams had always been accepted as normal until she read in some learned tome that it was in fact, not so. This set her apart from the herd on yet another count. She thought that was a nice idea.

The dreams, more than a little laden with peculiar scenes...brought on the sense of colliding with Hironymous Bosch in the land of nod.

War always brought images of intensity and doom, leaving her tired at the break of dawn. The pink pearl light of the sky did little to dispel the sense she was still caught in the clutch of a Svengali who instilled these visions in her because it amused him.

They served no purpose.

As a child it was commonplace to dream of her mother. One dream was of her mother being killed by an atomic bomb.

She awakened one morning to find her mother gone. She was very young, and struggled with her clothes, unaccustomed to dressing without help; a tug on a strap of her overalls that slipped her shoulder, or being supplied with a pair of socks so there was no need to climb on a chair to reach the drawer. The absence of the friendly hand brushing her hair, and fastening a barrette to keep it out of her eyes....

She prepared herself purposefully, and making sure to lock the door behind her with the key that hung on a pink ribbon around her neck, she headed for the cellar.

Pulling open the heavy door, she felt the unease that the cellar always evoked, but went down the stairs regardless of it. There her mother lay, perfect in death, on the floor in her underwear. It seemed very strange. She appeared to be sleeping.

With that deep sense of dread strangulating her, she squatted down and shook her mother. She knew there was no hope of awakening her. The atom bomb definitely killed anyone who got hit by it.

She began to cry, soon becoming so full of loss that she screamed like a wounded animal, choking on mucous and hysteria, gasping for air as the sound of her voice twisted, turned, and echoed through the labyrinthine catacomb maze of the cellar that bound together the buildings of the housing project where they lived.

Ah, she was suffocating from grief. The loss of love, so acute, so infinite, so devastating.... Oh, and the fear of the next bomb, as she crouched there trying to hear if there were sirens wailing, but the sound was her own keening.

And then the voice from far away..."what's the matter dear, what is it, did you have a dream?"

Oh, those sea colored, beloved eyes, so full of concern, was there ever anything so precious as that moment of her short sharp life? That good kind hand pushing back the copper colored hair from her wet, flushed face.

Would that she could place a kiss on that hand just one more time, so many years later....

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