I remember it like it was a dream. We were in a hotel, a nice one, a big one. There were people everywhere but no one near me. My family was there, but they were outside parking the car or getting our key from the front desk or asleep in their rooms.  Sheba was there, a streak of black against the ruby red carpet of the lobby floor.  This didn’t strike me as strange, which struck me as strange.

I turn to the marble column that hangs like a rope ladder down the well of stacked washer floors, where the elevator doors slide open at my approach. I feel compelled to wander. I feel like I need to find something.

I feel like I need to get to my room.

I get into the elevator with Sheba in tow. The circle for my floor lights up, six or seven or eleven, gravity twitches as the elevator takes off. Sheba looks up at me from the floor where she sits patiently panting against my pant leg.

She always looks at you.

To her you are God.

I step back and watch the dim lights cycle behind the numbers on the panel over the elevator doors. They don’t seem to go in any particular order, but such is to be expected.

You can’t ever read the numbers anyway, stop trying.

Sheba still sits (sits still) uncomplainingly beside me, wet breath soaking through the denim of my jeans.

Dogs pant because they don’t have sweat glands and have to cool themselves by circulating air quickly in and out of their mouths.

I wonder to myself what it is I could possibly need so badly, then-

-shrug-

-and edge my leg out of range of Sheba’s clammy breath.

Probably won’t ever find it anyway, you can’t even remember where you left your own car.

The elevator console pings as the doors open in innocent silence. As I get off the elevator, I glance down at the crack between the elevator car and the floor just as I step over it, knowing as I do that I am making a mistake.

Do you even have a car?

I wonder-

Bad idea.

Time turns to taffy between two big rigs going opposite directions on the superhighway of relativity. The moment my weight is in awkward limbo between right foot and left stretches into eternity. The terror seizes me like a cold syringe in the spine as I feel the cables silently scream in protest.