Her name is Dora Moore. She has medium brown hair and green eyes. She’s five feet, eight inches tall and weighs one hundred and twenty five pounds. She got married (against her parent’s wishes) to a Navy man when she was 19. She gave birth to a beautiful baby boy six months later. They struggled to make ends meet. They argued.  Sometimes he’d leave the house and not return until very late.  One night, while she was holding the baby, he yelled at her. The baby started to cry. Dora started to cry. He started to cry. “I’m so sorry!”

Things settled down and they went to bed. Dora got up sometime during the night and went to the kitchen. She got a butcher knife from the knife drawer and returned to the bedroom. Three hours later Dora was found walking across the military parade field in a blood covered nightgown. The MPs brought her to the hospital emergency room. That’s the last thing she can remember. Dora’s mother visits and leaves her a doll that was a favorite of hers from childhood. Dora begins to fantasize this is the healthy baby she’ll be soon taking home from the hospital.

She was afraid to sleep at night for fear she’d have another nightmare. She’d dream violent dreams of guns and sometimes knives. Of war and death and armies of men invading and ransacking the house in which she lived. She dreamed of old movie monsters chasing her on her way home from school. She could never run fast enough and just as the monster had her within reach she’d wake up from the terror of her dreams crying into her pillow as she clutched her favorite doll, still afraid to go to sleep at night, alone in her own bed.

She dreamed handsome young men would enter her bedroom as she brushed her soft brown hair by the lamp near the open window where the sheer curtains billowed in the wind while she gazed at the clouds drifting past the full moon. With shiny metal scoops, like the ones she saw in the huge ice-making machine in the kitchen of the nursing home where her mother used to work, they’d pour diamonds at her pretty feet. She found herself outside in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Dirty gray snowmen shoveled dirty gray snow at her dirty gray frostbitten feet.

She noticed a pack of snarling wild reindeer with gnarled antlers and sharp teeth tied to an old tree.  She was afraid they’d break free (which, of course, they did). They nipped at her as she lay perched upon mountains of trash.  She remembered the huge dumpsters outside the kitchen of the nursing home where her mother used to work, filled with half-eaten spaghetti, wilted salad, and soiled diapers. She’d awake from the terror of her dreams crying into her blanket as she clutched her favorite doll, still afraid to go to sleep at night, alone in her own bed.

She woke up in the middle of the night sweating.  It felt like a hot sticky humid summer day and the cold dry air coming in through the noisy air conditioner did little to towel her wetness.  She looked at the silent motionless lump of plastic lying next to her and smiled. She crawled from beneath the damp sheets and the moist heavy blanket to the bathroom.  She looked in disgust at the tangled matted mess of hair perched like an oil-slickened seagull atop her mooring-like head.  She trudged back to the bed to feed her baby.  She fell asleep.