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Last night was rife with dreams.

There were two cats - one had thin, sharp spikes for fur (or was it a small porcupine with a feline face?), then the other was a regular cat, with regular grey stripes and regular whiskers, though it had irregularly long, scythe-like claws. They were tussling in the back alley of an Italian restaurant, overturning giant meatballs and mounds of limp pasta. The porcupine-cat roared, striking the final blow, while the other "regular" cat sunk its claws into its chest.

Then we were in a house, my house, only bigger, with lace curtains that changed colors every time the wind blowed. He was there, with all my friends, in the room that used to belong to my brother. He still had hair like wildfire, though he was taller, whiter, and far more masculine than I remembered him to be. We had knocked down a dividing wall, and we were assembling four cribs for our babies. Quadruplets!, Myrza gasped, how will you raise all of them? He looked at me then, as he was putting the last screw in place, and smiled. I tended to one of the children, while our only boy twirled Glenn's long, blonde Venus-like hair around his chubby fingers. You don't want to be like your aunt, I said, she's had three husbands and none of them ever suspected she'd once been a man.

My brother Louis was there too, speaking as though he'd never had any difficulty with words. Be still, he shushed, there's going to be a storm.

Outside, our helpers were boarding up the windows, bringing in the laundry, locking our pet roosters in their cages. On TV, Guillermo (the hot CNN weatherman) beseeched all Manilenos to stay as high above ground as possible. That night, fifty 20-foot seahorses were expected to attack, as they rolled in angrily from the Bay. No explanations were offered, except that Atlantis was real and that we'd turned Neptune into a pearl-grubbing bureaucrat. Soon after that, winds blowing at 100+ kp/h wrapped around the house, blowing the dust off of everything. Instead of staying inside, we climbed up to the roof, and bound ourselves with extra-strength dental floss to the antennas, birds' nests and satellite dish.

We waited for the wind to settle down, talking as we usually did, without pretense or fear. One of the giant seahorses made an appearance, waving to us with its curly tail before settling in our tallest mango tree. After the squall was over, Marie, Gabby and Abigail volunteered to go to the nearest Donut Stand for us. I'd like chocolate-covered ones, heavy on the cream with just a sprinkling of berries, He said.

We hurried back inside, holding each other, careful not to drop our babies. When we reached the nursery, the seahorses were there. Using their long snouts, they were painting the cribs aqua blue.

We've come here to help you, They said.

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