In this dream we are driving through a car wash. It is the kind you pay for with tokens. Our daughter is strapped into the baby seat on the passenger side. She is facing me. The shower jet sprays on to the windows, shadows moving across her cheek like grey water. Her face is calm. There is a feeling of calm inside the car. In her right fist, when she unfurls it, is the triangular shard of an egg shell. I look closer and I realize the shard is a tooth and yet it is way too big for her mouth, way too sharp.

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Neil and I would sleep in a flat knot, pressed against one another like flowers in a book. He’d face the other side of the bed and offer me his back. I’d cling to it, marsupial, matching my smaller toes with his. His body was always hot, as if he were running a fever. I’d push my face into the hollow of his shoulders and breathe the oxygen out, until I fell asleep drowsy with asphyxiation. Often, when I couldn’t remember my dreams, I assumed we had dreamt about similar things and that reassured me.

In this dream she is sitting on the floor of my mother’s old kitchen, chequerboard lino throwing her tiny body into sharp relief. Her right leg is at an angle that I can tell is rather strange for a toddler. I’m not sure why I approach her, maybe nothing to do with the leg, some kind of instinct or intuition, because she honestly doesn’t look distressed, but when I get closer it becomes apparent that something is wrong. There is definitely something wrong with her legs. Her leg that is bent doesn’t match her other leg. Something about its length. I’m inching closer. It seems that her right leg is a few centimetres longer. I drop down to my knees to check: definitely some length longer. My mouth opens into the shape of B-A for ‘baby’, but the sound hasn’t quite come out when she looks up and says, perfectly eloquently, ‘Don’t worry, ma’am, it’s just tomato sauce.’ There is nothing on the black-and-white tiles.