When I was twenty-eight, I stocked shelves at a warehouse club retail store. She got hired a month after I started working. That night I had a dream about the two of us lying side by side atop a sixty-foot pallet of shrink-wrapped cereal boxes. In the dream we stared up at the rafters and talked about a four-story gothic mansion hidden in the dirt-caked gut of the woods. How we would build it, how many rooms we’d want, what we would do in there once it was finished. Her hair brushed against my neck like the long, soft fibers of lush prairie grass.

The next morning, I clocked into work and found my boss waiting for me by my locker. With a beckoning wave of his hand, he led me to the back of the store and unlocked a door I’d never seen before.

I walked up a long, narrow staircase of creaking wooden steps. At the top I found a small bedroom. Thick bars of shimmering gold light sliced in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I closed the door behind me. I turned to the bed in the corner of the room and saw her lying on her side in peaceful sleep, her shiny purple hair draped over the skin-sheathed nubs of the naked parabola of her spine. I slipped my clothes to the floor and climbed into bed beside her. I stared at the back of her head and breathed the vanilla scent of her hair. I rested my hand on her warm stomach and counted the rhythm of her breaths.