Straw Dreams

Diane thought her long tapered fingers looked strong yet delicate—and pretty too, but they didn’t seem to belong to her. They had rearranged her life, her conflicts, her dreams, and nearly her own death. With silent defiance, they laid limp and motionless in her lap. She had convinced her hospital interrogators that she would seek psychiatric help and she could care for herself. By her own design, her botched attempt appeared to be an accident, and she resumed her former life, but determined to follow her dreams. The husband she had divorced, and the life she had renounced, now took on an aura of absolute perfection; it became the dream of completion. With her hands, she would grasp for the future, to obtain the peace that she believed hovered in the spaces between reality and Straw Dreams.