I was in New York City, walking down 38th Street when I saw a place that I guess you would call a dressmaker’s dummy store. I stopped and looked in the window and was charmed and also the tiniest bit horrified. The shop was filled with headless, armless, legless dummies, small ones and large ones and medium-sized ones. The dummies were hanging from the ceiling and propped against the walls and shoved on shelves, one on top of the other. At a counter at the front of the store was an old man. He saw me looking in the window and raised his eyebrows. I smiled at him and he motioned for me to come inside; but for some reason, I couldn’t make myself go in. Instead, I stood there on the sidewalk, looking.

Later, I dreamed that I was walking down the same street and that it was raining and cold and that when I came upon the dressmaker’s dummy store, I was glad and opened the door and went inside.

The old man was there, sitting at the counter. He smiled at me. He said, “You are searching for what? You are needing what?”

I looked around the store. It was just as it had been in the real world, filled with dummies of all shapes and sizes. But in the dream, I recognized the truth of it, that each of the dummies was in the shape of a particular person. And that each person, each shape had the scroll of a story inside of it, curled tight and waiting for someone to unfurl it.

Outside, it was raining very hard. The shop was warm and dry and smelled of pipe tobacco and something sweet that I couldn’t name. The old man looked at me, waiting for me to answer him; and I was flooded with a sudden happiness, a surety.

But when I woke, it was to the sound of the questions: You are searching for what? You are needing what? The words ran through my head all day: You are searching for what? You are needing what? You are searching for what; you are needing what?

It wasn’t until late in the evening that I remembered the answer I had spoken in my dream.

“I want that piece of paper inside of them,” I said. “I want that scroll with the story on it.”

“Yes,” the old man had said, nodding. “Yes, that is good.”