waiting & weak legs

I was on a journey, travelling with another woman. We had stopped for a few nights at place in the bush, staying in a cabin. There were many others staying in tents and dormitory style accommodation – it appeared to be a conference or big event of some kind. I went into the main auditorium and stood backstage, watching acrobatic entertainment and listening to music. After a while, I decided that I had been backstage for far too long, and went to register as a performer. I spoke to a man down the front of the room who consulted a large notepad, checking his time schedule. He wanted to know if I would like to be the last to perform on the final night of the event, but aware that this would make me the headline act, I declined. I was allocated a timeslot as the second performance on the final night. I then felt slightly regretful and promised myself that I would not knock back such an opportunity again. The man said that he assumed I would be singing about food and I was surprised until I realised that it was an organic food event, so I agreed to think of a set of songs about food.

I went outside and joined a queue of people that were waiting to enter water of some kind, perhaps a swimming pool. I sat down for a moment and then found that I was unable to stand again. I tried and tried to stand up but my quadriceps had no strength – none. I was between two children in the queue: the child in front thought I was being funny and the child behind was even more pronouncedly floppy. I held the floppy child up in my right hand, supporting her back though her limbs drooped like a puppet’s.

Later, I was in the home where I lived with my family as a teenager. We were in the loungeroom and I was sitting in an armchair, facing the bookshelf. I couldn’t move my legs. A man came into the room, a stranger, and I called out to my father. Instead of coming into the room, my father ran up the stairs toward my bedroom, thinking I was in trouble and was in my room. Meanwhile, my mother came into the loungeroom and the stranger picked up long-stemmed umbrella and hit her across the legs with it, causing her to fall backwards into another armchair. Seeing my mother hurt, I managed to stand up, cross the room and, with a different long umbrella with a sharp point at the end, first hit the attacker and then stabbed him. At this stage it turned into a woman, the grown-up version of a girl I knew as a teenager. I thrust the umbrella into her chest and pushed downward so that I could see the point jutting out of her thigh. She didn’t die and hardly seemed affected or wounded. It was as though she were made of soft & pliable plastic.