She daydreams about awakening under the cracked-caramel dome of the bus shelter, on the praline bench, blanketed under the crinkled leaves of the indecipherable city paper, her pocket full of chocolate coins for bus fare. But dreams seldom bend her way. Sometimes, after falling asleep on her lumpy couch to re-runs of RuPaul’s Drag Race, she instead sinks into the ashy loam and dead-leaf silt of the afterlife forest. There, her first and favorite cat Sabine Silver-Beans kneads her cheeks until she rouses. She chases after Sabine, all silver and slate, but the cat ghosts through the sap-sobbing pines with their craggy bark, then corkscrews through the air after a swarm of salamander-small dragon hatchlings.

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The afterlife forest is preferable to the worst dream place—the palace of glass. Its walls are unbreakable tempered plates. Through them, she can see the azure void that capsules the palace. Its walls capture spears of light, transfix their golden nibs into spirograph ridges complex as the rippled jade of a cat’s iris. But she fears that place, fears the person who pursues her there—a shadow wearing track pants and slippers and a bathrobe. Too familiar, how the shadow slides the panels of glass aside and stumbles through the corridors framed by a corona of amber, emanating a burnt-sugar odor. The shadow’s bourbon aura reflects endlessly on the glass partitions, warping like the broken selves on funhouse mirrors. The palace of glass chills her. Cowering in its halls, she is brittle as an old bone needle.

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When she inhabits these places, a fine cable of neurons tethers her to the other place, the “real” place. Suspended by the wire rigging of her lucid half-sleep, she feels herself hovering over her own shape, curled up on the couch, knees tight to her chest. She is aware of everything: the drag queen crying on the television while wearing the candy-striped costume that child-her would’ve wanted, of her new tabby cat Mongo Monster-Cookie mountaineering down the incline of her hip, up the knoll of her shoulder.

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Her hips will ache in the morning, she knows. Something between her shoulders will feel off, pinched and pinned. This is what thirty-four feels like. The body, a pincushion, in constant want of a seamstress to slide out the pins and make use of the ache. For some reason she can never communicate this in the “real” place, over old-fashioneds with her friends or while narrating the ascendancy of Jinkx Monsoon on RuPaul’s main stage to Mongo Monster-Cookie. (I’d take a deer slug for baby Jinkx, she says; I’d take one for you, too, Mongo baby.) Of pain, she can only gripe: Bodies suck but they’re all we’ve got.

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But tonight she is lucky. Tonight sleep transports her to the dream city, to the praline bench that radiates a sweetness of nut and brittle: like her grandmother’s breath, like the trace of her grandmother’s promise that she was safe from her momma’s whiskey bedside whispers. She shucks the newspaper from her lap, her torso. Manufactured from old peanut-butter cup liners, the paper accordions shut into a narrow yet stiff baton. She flicks her wrist, and the paper’s folds warble into a readymade paper fan. Good: it always gets hot on the bus. Better this way, than when the newspaper furls up like the papers she’d mooched off friends in undergrad, to roll the saddest joints in the history of subpar collegiate spliffs. Or when it shreds into a deck of frail playing cards, spilling through her fingers in a death drop of harlequined jacks and queens and kings.

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From a rack on the shelter’s candy wall, she selects several timetables that she cannot read. The text is a blend of Cyrillic characters, wing-dings, emojis. Yet, there’s something solacing about the schedule, how the arrival and departure times are laid out on a grid with the scientific certainty of nutrition facts. It’s comforting. Consistent. She’ll keep the timetables. She snaps a corner off the praline bench. That’s coming with her, too. The city always makes her hungry. All cities should be edible, just like all cars should be manufactured solely from Nerf.

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In time the bus trundles to the caramel shelter. Its hull is fabricated from sour-apple Jolly Ranchers. The transparent, jade shell exposes all of the bus’s innards: the mixer that judders and revolves the dough-hook drive shafts, the rolling pretzel-log axles. The parts and their impossible movements fascinate her, just like when she was a child wondering how the pixelated phantoms on her Game Boy’s screen meandered from the cartridge, through the pins, through the circuit boards visible under the handheld’s translucent lime casing.

The bus couches. Its sour-apple doors flange open. She steps on, fishes a fistful of chocolate coins from her pocket. She pitches the coins into the fare console. They rattle around the console’s slot, drain-swirl down its gullet. The console chimes. The driver, a licorice raven, scowls and dusts sugar from his beak. He smells faintly of star anise and Aspercreme. His rubbery feathers have molted on his jowls. His once-black plumage, cresting from the collar of his uniform blouse, has peppered with age.

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She sidles down the aisle and takes a seat in the back. With a flick of her wrist, she opens her peanut-butter-cup fan and buffets her throat with lukewarm air. That is the thing about the city: it is like the other place and it is like her; it ages and changes. Somedays she notices hairline cracks in the gingerbread brickwork of the skyscrapers, or notices the frosting mortar chipping away. Other times the gumdrop newspaper kiosks are vandalized, their cellophane panes flagging in the wind. And one time all the phonebooths—those white-chocolate KitKat boxes with doors that snapped shut-open-shut-open—had been ripped from the sidewalks. Only spindly, gummy-worm wires remained to show where they’d been.

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The bus meanders through the city. Its route resembles none of the maps etched in the candy-liner timetables. She trusts the licorice raven with the wheel, trusts the regular jerks and jolts of the bus, trusts that she does not have to rush.

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In the rearmost row, she devours the corner of the praline bench, sucks the sweetness and nut-bitterness from her fingers. She waits. In the dream city, she is always waiting, either for the bus or for the woman in the raincoat and the plastic bonnet. The woman whose face is a cat-shaped candy dish, one cartoon eye winking. The bus gambols along the streets but sometimes plops—without warning—into the suburbs with graham-cracker roofs or the industrial district with the baking chocolate warehouses. It is dreamtime, but city-time is always dreamtime. And at any rate, she can’t read the city-language—not in the newspaper or the bus schedule. So it means nothing to her.

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Whenever she sees a rain slicker, a trench coat, or a translucent bonnet, she reaches to the pull cord. She always restrains herself from tugging the line, but the bus grinds to a halt at each stop regardless. Passengers disembark and board, little candy and confection animals gussied in business suits and school uniforms and the red-and-yellow striped tunics of interchangeable fast-food franchises. And yes—she sees a few yellow raincoats with the hoods lifted. The driver caws to whatever he’s listening to—a podcast in the city-language, all male voices and all vaguely threatening. The raincoats board the bus, amble to their seats. But they are never her candy-dish cat: they shuck their bonnets and shake out the rain. Their heads are sugar-glass fishbowls or chocolate horse masks or marshmallow Peeps or goldfinch faces spun from lemon cotton candy.

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The last stop is always the first—the caramel bus shelter. Bright, indecipherable posters cover the hairline cracks in the shelter’s panes. The praline bench has already been repaired. She exits after the others and the driver slams the doors shut, hard. The crowd disperses. Above, mold filigrees the pink, cotton-candy clouds. It rains blue nectar, agave sweet, with lemon-drop lightning flashes. The city dissolves. (That’s the thing about cities: they are sugar and floss, they melt in your mouth and in your mind.) She only wants to talk to her, the candy-dish woman, to tell her, before Mongo Monster-Cookie starts grooming her ear canal with his bristle-brush tongue and dials on the nerve-endings that would reel her back to the “real” place.

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A voice rings, like a teaspoon against the rim of her grandmother’s coffee mug. What do you want to tell her?

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The caramel bus shelter has collapsed into a pool of goop. A block away, the bus sheds half-dissolved panels. A great wingspan of an opened, yellow rain slicker rounds the corner. There, a gingerbread tower sponges the syrup rain, bloats, and collapses in on its own weight. Candy-dish cat winks. Her fanged-grin shimmers with amber, with bourbon-barrel heat. Candy-dish cat unbuttons her coat, shoves her hands into the pockets of her track pants.

 

They approach each other.

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Tell her what? three ceramic syllables, silver against porcelain. The candy-dish cat rests a gloved hand against her cheek. The lady’s ceramic face smells treacly as bourbon. The syrup rain on her coat is blue as the infinite void that gels around the palace of glass.

Tell you what? About the candy princess on the television, or about the girl asleep on the couch, or about Sabine Silver-Beans and the forest, but not about the glass palace and the thing behind the panels, but what about the cat tongue grazing her ear lobe far away in the other place? About this body and the aches that needle the voids between her bones?

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The candy-dish cat takes her hand. Yes. Tell me what?

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To stay, she wants to say: but there is a crack of porcelain, of a crystal dish shattering into a million tempered skittles, of sugar bursting like hourglass sands. The city has melted again, its power grid of citrus and want a casualty of the night. And already the other place is drawing her back—dawn pelts her eyes and Mongo kneads her shoulders and the voice of RuPaul welcomes her to the only place she belongs: with her cat, on her couch, watching the main stage of another season.

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Wait, she says to the bleary coffee table, half-visible through her lashes, wait. But the dream city is already gone, nothing more than the sugar crust binding her eyelashes.