March 16, 2017
I dreamed that I was staying with my grandmother, and a few cousins and I were hanging out in the garage at night with the lights off. I could see a large but vague shadow come into the garage. I was sure, from what I could make out, that it was a cougar. I reached for a pellet gun, just in case, and turned on the flashlight app for my iPhone. In the diffuse, cold light, flaming orange striped with black flared into visibility, and a tiger sprang up from where it had been lying on the cool concrete and sped out of the garage into the yard.
We all ran to the garage door, and I shone my light out into the yard, and there were more tigers, and lions, and bears. And we all said, “Oh my!” in unison.
The next day, I traveled to Castroville for a high school reunion. It was still early in the morning when I got there, and I was really hungry, so I stopped at a Burger King for some breakfast. But my order just wouldn’t ring up right, no matter what I tried to order, or what the cashier did. I *knew* $25 was too much for pancakes, though, and the line behind me was getting really long. As I left, defeated and unfed, one of the other employees started yelling at me about how rude I was to not make up my mind and let the line get like that. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, but she just kept berating me. And somehow she told the whole town, because after that, I passed a number of my old classmates, and said hello, but they pretended not to know me, or only barely remember me, even when I told them who I was. One of them finally said, okay, we’ll say hello to you on the street, but don’t act like we’re your friends.
So I headed out of town and ended up at a big, gloomy old hotel. There was an Amish family staying there, and the mother wanted her daughters to have nothing to do with me. I had to stay there for a few days while I conducted some sort of business dealing, and I tried going back to the Burger King, too, and finally got my breakfast to ring up correctly, but the family just seemed to get weirder and weirder.
The girls seemed to really like me, and wanted to talk to me, but they’d run and hide if their mother came calling. Finally one night they showed up, and they had both cut their hair to be short like mine! I knew there’d be trouble after that, and sure enough, their mother came raging at me for corrupting her daughters. She was much taller than me, and she grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned down right into my face and starting yelling at me to confess my “unclean acts”.
I tried over and over to tell her that actually all my acts were pretty squeaky clean, and I certainly hadn’t *told* her daughters to cut their hair. Finally she seemed to calm down, and said, very quietly, “Okay. Okay.” She sighed and put her hands on my cheeks, holding my head, and then she began to change.
Her face stayed right in front of mine, but her body sort of unfolded around her, and began curling in thick tentacles across the lawn and up into the big old tree beside the hotel, that we were standing under. Her hands turned into wiry tendrils that were twisted strands of bright blue and green sinew, and ropes of the same sprang from the nape of her neck. These looped themselves in the branch overhead, and began to come back down to wind around my neck. I fought them off, and found I could pinch them apart in my fingers. I kept struggling and pinching and yelling, and then I woke up.
No comments:
Post a Comment