White bison in my dream, as if I know such a creature exists.

It does. Very rare. I Google it the next morning. A calf born in Yellowstone only a couple of years ago.

The white bison is mad, not angry but crazed. Okay, maybe angry, too. He chases me. I can’t outrun him, something I know, like a fact, though I try anyway. When I feel him at my heels, I reach back to take hold of his horns so he won’t gore me, though that doesn’t stop his running, his charging, and he forces me down to the ground among twigs and stones, pushing me before him as if he’s a bulldozer and I the remains of something that had once been useful but is now debris. My body raked by the earth.

It’s like Jesus. This is what Google tells me. Not completely. Not at all, really, except as the fulfillment of a prophecy. Powerful. Sacred. A promise of harmony, but also a warning. The myth: when a white bison returns, it will be a sign that the earth is diseased. Earthquakes, viruses, things like that. Returns from where, I wonder. Anyway, this is an indigenous belief. Not mine. Nor do I believe in the second coming, or anyone coming, though maybe I should. It might make things easier. Just to live. To be in this world, to wake each day to unceasing headlines.

Now the clouds overhead grow dark. This is not a metaphor. I sit in the garden, facing southeast so that light from the dawn will touch my retina. I’d read about it in a post on Instagram. Circadian rhythms. Don’t look directly at the sun, it said. As if anyone needs to be told. No sun today, though.

I was sure I would wake up because that’s what happens when things get too painful. Or when we’re about to die. The fall off the cliff, the trigger pulled on the gun. Normally, I would gasp, startle, my eyes would open to find I was safe in my bed, heart pounding but the night quiet, blankets that weigh on my body and lull me back toward different dreams, the kind I won’t later remember. But the white bison, running, running, forces me along the ground as rocks and sticks cut my skin, tangle my hair. In my dream I know it’s a dream. That I’ll open my eyes. Any minute.