I was back in school. I was lost in the hallways. I found the art students but it was not my day to take art. They had newsprint pads and practiced figures in charcoal the first day of school. They were younger than me. It was my day to take writing. I couldn't find my class but I knew if I saw Jasmine or Eileen it was the right one. I was wearing a sarong with a white t-shirt. I taped my story to the white sarong tied into a skirt. I was staying at Corinne's family's. There was a plague. The sky filled with dark spots--locusts, angry--clumping up thick and mucus-y on the way down. They catapulted straight through canopies and made your eyes fill with mucus and swell shut so you couldn't see. School children were screaming. I got inside out of the raining locusts and asked a man what it was. He said a certain kind of pollen--the next county over had gotten out of control and when the spray truck sprayed insecticide it gummed up the pollen and this county didn't have the antidote and it was painful but harmless. I got a grocery cart and got groceries. Toys and appliances were mixed with the groceries--it was hard to tell front from back. I looked at Chinese vegetables but I got a strawberry popsicle. I was walking home eating my popsicle and I dropped it and Brittany came with a spoon to help me scrape it off the road and save some. She had a lot of it. I had the rest. Brittany's sister, Corinne, was underwater--playing with a boy who was already dead. They were doing back flips and somersaults in the water but when anybody else came around they played dead--him lying flat on his stomach lifeless. I liked to watch them play underwater in slow motion without gravity--their hair floating in front or behind them. The neighbors were from Cuba. They sat in the backyard. I kept getting lost and wandering into different Cuban's yards. The old man didn't mind. He showed me how to get back to the main road more than once. Rudy had written a play and they were acting it out when the locusts came. We tried to keep some kind of order--but with raining locusts, mucus eyes and everybody wanting a popsicle, rehearsals weren't going too good. I made a list of notes. The main character--a black lady who cooked--took the list with her and crinkled it up in her hand--and held onto it--as if she could feel the suggestions better than reading them.