Dora was coming home. We were all very happy about this. It was 11 a.m. She was to get there by 1 p.m. Since bathing suits were on sale at Belks, My mother thought I should get one. We went to look at them. I wandered off by myself with weird contacts in my eyes. One was my father's college ring. I had the idea to get a necklace made with 3 stones--each stone exactly the color of my eyes, Rudy's eyes and Dora's eyes. 3 shades of blue. I looked at a rack of hair ribbons. I liked them. One was brown with wide frayed edges. I tied a blue boa-ish feather in my hair. The stem broke and stood at a crazy angle. Frothy blue billowing as I walked. When I got back my mother was looking at the swimsuits. One was an old blue/navy one like hers. Others by Catalina had little cotton daisies embroidered. The one-piece blue, navy/white suit like my mother's old one was $1.29--but it disintegrated when you touched it. We left without getting anything. When we got back I realized I had not taken a shower. And Dora was due back any minute. When she got there she looked beautiful. Her hair was very blonde like when she was little. Thick. Cut with short straight bangs and just even with near the bottom of her ears. We stood in front of the bathroom mirror, holding onto each other's shoulders and looking into each other's eyes. Alive sparkling with love our eyes but Dora could not stay. As soon as she got there she was gone again. The kitten was on the living room floor playing with some lettuce. It was alive, the lettuce, and it would jump, hop and move by itself. Then the kitten would jump the lettuce and the lettuce would try to hop away. The kitten spinned a lid into the clover and jumped--pounced after it--on top of it in the clover. WW III happened. I was riding with my father in a school bus, looking at a book of tornado statistics. For the months of this March/April the book predicted tornadoes--I looked on my birthday to see the likelihood of a tornado hitting on my birthday. We missed the school bus. In the bus lot school buses were blown in a ditch--the roofs pulled off. The tornado had hit and we didn't have any food. Time was running out and my father left the barnyard--he pulled the freight. A mother and her near-grown son were eating their lunch in the front door. We walked in and asked for something to eat. "I'll cut up some more cabbage," the lady said and she left to go to the kitchen. "Can I use your bathroom?" I asked the near-grown boy. I had to pee very bad. Keith had been on a trip to Mexico but was apprehended and now was in a total darkness treatment center for 6 weeks.