Dream at Twelve Noon

by Tor Strand

I am asked how much longer there will be light and know immediately, something to do with how the trees enter the sky on a mountain with my family and two friends climbing to an open dirt patch they touch and kiss me then with the sweet realness of a dream where everyone speaks and listens and eclipses—how much longer, my dear teacher wonders at the grayscale world, heavy with rain and I whisper in her ear violet, that dark white purple of cold winter morning and my grandmother agrees, laughing, yes, she tells my brother you must use a rowboat and oars and row sounds drown his response and again I say, sagebrush or evening or that dark-sighted morning and this time from nothing my mother’s mother smiles in an aura, so as to say, say it and disappears and my mother and father are there and I am organizing books, some of them wet, left open to the storm.

About the author…

Tor Strand is a recent graduate of Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. He studied creative writing and German while at Linfield, and is now living in Anchorage, Alaska. While in school, Tor was a head editor of the campus literary journal, and as a senior, he worked as the assistant nonfiction editor for High Desert Journal, a literary magazine of the mountain west.