A telephone call from the land of the dead

I dreamed that my mother rang me up on the telephone to talk about my sister. As she began to speak, the vague annoyance I always feel when she initiates conversations like these, surfaced. But you’re dead, I said. You’re dead. Am I? she wondered in that guileless way she has. I don’t think so. I’m in Perth. Later the place where she was shifted even further into the west but I cannot now recall where. It was anyway a place of cacophony, a place of voices: my sister, certainly, was there; perhaps my father too. And myriad others.