Free The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish

loveable, except for that shitty hair,” she tells Connie. “She probably doesn’t know who you are, just like you may not know who she is.”
    Connie shrugs and turns her back to the clouds. This hair artist, she thinks, is totally correct. Connie Franklin Nixon has no idea who Jessica Franklin Nixon is. She knew her once, could predict what she would eat off of her plate, how she would stand in the doorway, what her grades in math class would be. She has this view of Jessica, her daughter, as that—a daughter. A girl still, one who rushes in and out of her mother’s life, has a cardboard box filled with secrets and, apparently, ran screaming from Indiana to New York City with a dream that she never once shared with her mother. Her own mother.
    “I hate you,” Connie says, smiling, moving across her seat so she can whisper the next sentence. “I’m sure she never uses any of the sex toys she sells.”
    The two women, unlikely companions on a journey through a slice of life that Connie sees as a thin line connecting her to something…something new, something frightening, something beyond what she imagined just hours ago as she boldly attacked three major numbers from her list at the same time.
    It is female communion. That astonishing crossing of cultures and ages and time and place that wraps women together and makes them one. It is a holy moment, a sacred sharing of estrogen, a remarkable gift of love. It can happen in a public waiting room when a stranger asks another woman to hold her baby—her beautiful baby—when she needs to go to the bathroom. It can happen when you see a woman on a street corner and two guys are hassling her and you open your car door and she gets in without hesitation. It can happen when you see a woman at the grocery store crying because she is a dollar short and you pay her bill and carry her groceries to the car with her kids and then slip her another 20 bucks. It can happen when you are at a play and that woman you saw arguing with that asshole man won’t come out of the last stall of the bathroom until you hand her some toilet paper and then she cries into your shoulder and you give her the phone number of the women’s shelter. It can happen when your mother tells you about her first love and your heart stops because you realize your father was her second choice. It can happen anywhere—this female communion where women feel safe and close and absolutely as if they have touched a piece of heaven because of you.
    It can happen on an airplane on the way from Chicago to New York.
    “See, you look sexy when you are sad and I can’t help but imagine you with a light color, some dark tits, oops, I mean tints.” Mattie laughs as the plane dips lower and New York spreads itself out on either side of the plane as if it were doing its own Broadway dance. “Oh, look, there’s my city.”
    Connie looks. She pushes her forehead against the window and watches the edges of the city grow like a fan until New York is an enormous palette of brown and silver and green below her. Massive lines of cars moving like snails across bridges, and the surge of blue when the plane dips towards the Atlantic makes her stomach rise with excitement. The city glows. She has only been to New York City once before, on a quick two-day trip with a group of friends from the hospital, but she’s never really
been
to the city and she surely has never imagined that this is why and how she would get there.
    When she turns back towards Mattie, her new friend—who is young enough to be her daughter and wise enough to be her mother—is smiling. She has written her cell phone number on the back of her business card.
    “Wait till you get your feet down there,” Mattie says, pressing the card into Connie’s hand. “I love the action, the sleeplessness of it all, the constant surge of life that makes you feel as if nothing, not one single thing, is standing still.”
    “I live in Indiana,” Connie replies flatly and