I'm with my children, the boy and the girl, and we're going home. It's a grey day, featureless, the boy is walking with us just out of reach, the girl, she's clinging to me, she's sad and crying.
There's a long row of condominium / townhouses, they vary in size and shape but they're all connected. I live somewhere in there, but I'm not sure exactly where, and we climb a flight of stairs to this covered "subway" type platform and she's there. It's her, only she's exaggerated in limbs, extra thin, long, long legs and arms, a slender torso, she's wearing a short skirt and a corset and a Venetian half mask and she's come to surprise me, she's wearing a wide, toothy smile like you might imagine the joker to be wearing....
When she sees us she laughs lightly and runs away down the stairs on the other side, laughs like a Japanese Geisha, then she returns and follows me, talking, prattling. The children don't recognize her, but my daughter is clingy, sad, holding on to my side. She's lost the mask and is prattling to me, talking, trying to make plans for a rendezvous, right now I don't care, walking across the parking lot, an empty field, the town-homes extending off in an endless row to the horizon, I just want to find our home.