The tree is bent backwards in a strange erotic and crippled shape. It is tied to a post. I say, "Yet it grows and blooms!" I speak to a woman in front of my family home. There are three marble steps, leading down to a subway, outdoors/indoors train. I am scared to plunge down steps, but a kindly man embraces me once I do. On the train to a commercial design studio. I finally make newspaper drawings to earn money. A man who had a code name introduces me to a woman who also has a code name and is an illustrator. She looks over these commercial fashion figure drawings and tells me to trim off excess lines and smooth them. Drawings are in black wash, very dark of a woman in a very rococo dress with one hand raised. I tell a sister-in-law she can use my fixed up car for a trade-in instead of a damaged car and get more towards the purchase of a new car that way.

There is a palm branch from the palms in front of my childhood home, next to the Church, where worshipers would cut down on Palm Sunday to take to Church. This would make my Father angry. The palm was between the duplex’s front marble steps, which I used to slide down on a rainy day. The long train way, like toboggan path, is the same shape as an umbilical cord.