I had a dream last night. I was in St. Andrews but it wasn’t St. Andrews, and there were zombies hunting me. The whole world was overrun by zombies. I had a gun but when I fired it the bullets zipped off in odd directions like those balloon stalls at crooked amusement parks. All out at sea there were sharks and you could see the sharks from the shore – big beautiful silver shapes circling in clusters of three. I tried to climb out onto a boat via a heavy rope, and I almost got low enough to touch the sharks, but I couldn’t and didn’t, and when I got onto the boat there were more zombies.

Then I woke up.

I realised then that it was more or less the same dream I’ve had every night. Sharks. St. Andrews. Zombie-like bad guys. Guns that don’t fire.

One night, after my toddler twins went to sleep, I wandered aimlessly around my dining room. I looked at the dishes in the sink, the pile of unpaid bills and stacks of papers that needed my response, the unread book with testimonials of changed lives, which I’d been reading three pages at a time for a month. I surveyed my options for a moment and decided on the book – in theory, I wanted to change my life.

I went to say goodnight to my teenage daughter, who was watching The Truman Show. I stood by the couch, book in hand, and watched the movie. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the couch, book on my lap. An hour and a half later I got off the couch, picked up the book, and said goodnight. I placed the book back in its spot and stood staring at it for a long time while I considered whether I really wanted my life to change.

• horror movie sheep sculptures

• inflatables on water

• sand skeletals

• night fire figures & industrial effigies

• cheval-de-frises

• steeplechase grounds for huntsmen spiders, along with a family of
giant puppet figures made from piano wire & polystyrene,
foam, poultry supplies, gauze & nylon stockings full of hay

• oatmeal-textured plaster encrusted mannequin heads

• sexual ceremony boxes that look like beekeeper’s hats

• cheesecloth covered molds of limbs
and faces & exaggerated genitals

• skeleton men made of coat hangers

• complex diagrams, models & blueprints of imaginary machines,
maps, games, intelligence tests

• illuminated mental illness manuscripts and talismans
of luminous casual revelation and continuous apocalypse

How nervous is that?

The first I gave you was Farewell, My Only One by Antoine Audouard, a novel written in French, translated into English and shipped across the ocean where I found it on a shelf in the mountains. I lay it in my suitcase and took it back to France where I put it in your hands.