Melanie's Letter  I'm at the Redding farm. I have a bunch of mail. In the mail is a letter to me from my friend Melanie McDyss. Melanie is there, with another woman. They walk by me. Melanie says a short, halfhearted hi, and keeps walking. I see my classmate Megan Cunningham and two older men. She says something about her party that night. I express mild interest, to appease her, but am not interested in the party and won't go. I sit and read the letter. It is on several sheets of letter-sized white paper. As I read the letter, my classmate Bethany Hurwitz and a woman I know from high school bother me. Melanie sits at a distance from me, down near the garden, as I read. The letter is slightly odd, and somewhat sexual in parts. The woman from high school seems to be reading along with me. The letter is on the inside of a piece of a Fruit Loops cereal box. In the letter Melanie wrote a poem entitled "Success", and told me of a dream in which she and I nearly had sex. I'm lying back on the ground, and the woman is standing near me. I yell and sweat at her, telling her to go away. Melanie is closer to me then, sitting cross-legged in the grass. A bit later I turn and look and Melanie is very close to me. I quickly crawl over and jokingly tackle her, and we wrestle. She talks about a dream she had in which she and I almost had sex: we did everything but have sex. She has a name for sex, ____ ( I forget). She tells me how her dream happened, acting it out as we roll in the grass. She says, "Like this", and kisses me briefly. I kiss her back, more aggressively. She tells me not to kiss her because all the people are around. She has dyed her hair red and is wearing a red striped shirt. There are a couple tackle boxes there with slip bobbers in them. The tackle boxes are open. Melanie and I talk about the boxes. I may dampen the conversation by what I say.