Prompt # 10 - Unexplained Memory

Prompt # 10 - Unexplained Memory

 

My friend Elisabeth says that her recurring nightmare is that the restaurant is full, a bus load of tourists has arrived, she's taking their orders as fast as she can but at the same time tearing out her hair and crying: "There's no one in the kitchen!" She recognizes this, every waitress's worst nightmare, as stemming from the years she worked in food service. I worked for years in federal corrections, minimum, medium, and high security, and I don't have nightmares about that. Maybe I should, but I don't. But my own recurring nightmare, my unexplained memory, also has something to do with a kitchen. Although I was never really sure whether it was memory or premonition.

 

Everything is white, painted white. The counter is high and covered with old-fashioned kitchen tools--wooden bread troughs, a whole round of cheese, woven baskets, and things hanging from the ceiling. Red things. Black things. (Love that this dream is in colour.) And they're dripping. Dripping blood. A brace of something, like pheasants or fowl in old genre paintings. I am looking, but I cannot force myself to go in.

 

This dream recurs over the years. I try to parse it. Dead chicken? Blood? The day my mother chose to tell me the facts of life, as she eviscerated chickens, prepping them for winter food, and all I could do was try to keep control of the gag reflex. Kitchen dreams? Nigella I am not. A galley kitchen? My very first apartment, a studio with a galley kitchen so small you had to choose your task and turn to that side before entering. It was in an old building at River and Osborne in Winnipeg which has since been renovated into a trendy upscale shopping mall. I shared the bath, which was outside in the hallway, two separate doors, with the apartment next door which appeared to be occupied by a tall redhead in a raccoon coat who was only home when she brought "friends" up with her. Once I had a break-in but I suspected the druggie friend of a friend who knew when to target me. But why would this place haunt me? Perhaps there was danger lurking of which I was not sufficiently aware? The meaning remained a mystery.

 

Then, this summer, on my return trip to Portsmouth, UK, I was touring HMS Victory again, taking my digital camera and my tablet this time, because for some reason the first time I went (24 years ago) I didn't take pictures. And I didn't know at that time that I had relatives who had worked on the Victory. So back I went. Obediently following the one-way signs, middle, upper, top decks, gun decks, and below. Pausing to breathe. Hyperventilating. Accepting advice from concerned fellow tourists. And there it is. Literally. My nightmare. And it is, literally, a galley kitchen (although this is far from Winnipeg.) And there are dead chickens (mock, I hope) hanging. And old-fashioned kitchen utensils, wooden bowls, a wheel of cheese! So it was not a premonition, nor an admonition. My recurring dream was a memory, and the panic attached to it is the panic of the claustrophobia of this cramped vessel, once home to 800 souls at a time. I had been too upset to stop to take pictures back then. Too upset to recognize why. Too young to understand what my brain, my blood, had known. That I would have to return. That I would return.

 

 

So it's strange that this topic should come up just when the meaning of the recurring nightmare has been revealed as a memory which is no longer a mystery.