《Uneasy Dreams》
The Killing Moon
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Sea, Swallow Me
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Fabric Drug Idol
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so empty white (even the blue tinge of fish-death was absent) that to call them "milky" would be a misnomer. Marble, perhaps, a more apt comparison, little chunks of flash-frozen perfection from out of a statue. Twin twitching antennae, the only sign of life above the neck. They at once resembled moth-horns and moth-eaten millinery (slain glory, mating signal in vain, cast to rot in a hat-box), and moved like ants on fire. Frantically searching for a
Be Quiet And Drive: Fear And Loathing In Unknown Kadath
Young Andy reported to my office at around 10:30 am, thirty minutes earlier than our agreed-upon meeting time, looking disheveled. Straw colored hair, a rats'' nest; eyes bruised by bludgeoning insomnia.
"What the hell happened to you, kid?" I asked.
"Roused from peaceful sleep by a big-ass mynah bird," came his croaky reply. "Damn terror. I got the fears, man. Mind if I come in, or you gonna leave me dissociating on your front stoop?"
You''re not dissociating if you''re aware of it, I thought, but gestured for him to enter regardless. "Can I get you some coffee?" I asked.
"I can''t deal with bitter right now, or the clean-cut sharp-sweet of sugarcane. If I''m gonna take a drink, it needs to be sickly-hazy sweet, fake sweet, saccharine syrup; the kind that fills your mouth with fruit gas. You know what I mean?"
"Sure I do, but I have a policy." If I''d had a sign by my desk to tap, I would have. Actually, that might be a useful investment. Save me plenty of breath. "No ethers, absinthe, dream-wine, or other street-names for the same¡ªby which I mean the Lethe Syrup you''re noodling at¡ªbefore 11 AM."
"Aw, cut me some slack, Doc, like I said¡ª"
"Big-ass mynah bird, right. The fears. You already told me. I can sympathize, but..." I trailed off. I could sympathize. You know that feeling when you fall out of bed and split your lip on the nightstand, and you look down at the cherry-colored flow (too tired to move) turning to rust before your very eyes ("like magic!") and you think oh God, can this night get any worse? Then you look over and see gray beginnings of dawn peeking through the blinds with the chirping of early birds (fat and happy on swollen nightcrawlers who pushed their sunrise luck) and you think, oh no, resign yourself to looking over at the alarm clock, and it screams out at you 5:30! 5:30! 5:30! in shrill blinks? Not a good feeling.
Which is why I was feeling generous towards Young Andy on this balmy April morning. "I''ll cut you a deal," I said to him. "You tell me everything you dreamed¡ªno pruning the finer Freudian details, they please my journal''s periphery readers¡ªand damn what the clock says, I''ll let you have a whiff of anything I got. But then you''ve gotta wait to clean your consciousness till the clock clears my conscience. Deal?"
Young Andy just grunted, his eyes in a reptile glaze. He blinked, polished them, and I don''t mean to brag but he starts going on about my poeticisms and how they make him feel so sunny and I swear it was like he was a needle-fanged vampire tucked into my veins. Because I don''t remember a word of what he said, only the dizzy euphoria-sick sentiment of being seen.
See, I would have dealt in more Earthly and addictive substances than dreams, but I''m not predatory enough by nature, I don''t think. I like to think of myself more like an ox-pecker, and my clients great stinking bug-ridden buffalo. I take their parasitically draining dreams down, press them into my notebook like flower petals; and publish the blood-grease spots for the general public to Rorschach whatever meaning they get from them. I, myself, find nourishing meaning in the act of cleaning. So you see I''m not really so bad, except for when I get to thinking about myself (Narcissus tumbling in an internal pool) and forget to listen to the people in front of me, like I was doing at that very moment.
"The form! Please? Doctor, please, can I have my intake form? You still¡ª" he grasped at the air, for the spider-silk right word, the way mania will make you¡ª"do those?"
Seeing him surrender like that made me sad. I handed the clipboard over my desk; Andy snatched it in slow motion. Fervently, shaking hands (quivering, I mean) and a firm grip, with all the speed of a tortoise (stumbling under observation? Suffering the centipede''s dilemma). Kid really had the Fears.
Couple minutes later he''d filled out the form, as usual. Last name, first name. "Andy, Young". Messily scrawled. with no regard for the blanks¡ªthe lines. Plenty of other identifying information, too, which I''m not at liberty to share. You understand.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"So tell me about your dream," I said, again gesturing sweepingly behind myself.
"I was at the park. It was a warm day, and I was shivering. The ground was damp and steep, I was sitting¡ªalone¡ªon a hill overlooking a pond. Next to my dad. We were feeding the ducks bread. You ever feed bread to ducks?"
"Not in a while."
"It''s not good for them, apparently. But my dad isn''t the kind of guy to care about that. If he has an idea of an idealized day out, at the park feeding bread to the ducks, he''s not going to let anything stop it from happening. So that''s how it went. I was cold and shivering on this nice sunny day, next to my dad, completely alone, feeding bread to the ducks, killing them for the sake of not hurting his fragile feelings." Poor kid was spitting his words with all the pained angst of a sludge headache.
"The ducks had been clustering at the bottom of the hill for a while. There weren''t many left in the pond, so the water was relatively still. My fingers were a little too numb to tear the bread and between that and the guilt I had left the bread to my dad and was just watching the still surface, like Narcissus, except I couldn''t see my face, just my silhouette against the sky at the top of the hill.
All of a sudden there''s this gliding ripple, cutting the surface like scissors across a sheet of wrapping paper; and it wasn''t a duck. Whatever cut the water like that was under the surface, and ducks don''t dive. I kept watching it, and eventually it caught my dad''s attention too. He asked me what I thought it was; I don''t remember what I said but I don''t think it mattered to him. because he told me, "No, buddy, it''s a muskrat." I remember those words. None of the rest of his rambling chatter; just the only time he stood up and looked down at me. Anyways¡ª"
The whole time Andy had been telling me this story, I''d been scribbling like crazy, trying to note down his frantic and fearful words to pace with their oily quickness; it was at this point that it occurred to me he may have (consciously or no) filled in the blanks with details that more blatantly reflect his complexes as he saw them. Translating a dream to a story, one-to-one, is an inherently futile endeavor. The appeal of dreams is the ways in which they don''t make sense as narratives, as chronologies, in the ways they repeat and fold in on themselves and the ways they resist the objective record. They''re never so blatant as "my father was there"; it''s always "this one golfer I saw on TV once (who may or may not look like the dreamer''s father, or otherwise be associated with him) was sitting on a throne in a room of indeterminate size and looking down at me." Then perhaps some qualified professional with a dogmatic guide to divination-in-different words (by which I mean a psychoanalytical altar) can pull out a sweater-thread of meaning, pull down the curtain, and say, "I think this represents your trauma surrounding your father!"
At this blessed epiphany the patient leaps to his feet. "By Jove, I think you''ve solved it!" he exclaims, and skips out of the hypnotically dim office, coins raining from his pockets, to rejoin the world as a productive member of society. Doctor and patient never see each other again; the fog of brain fever lifts and never returns; all dreams are rainbow-sugar, feathers tickling pleasure centers, immediately forgotten upon waking.
Of course I am no qualified professional. I''m just someone who can''t sleep at night, and sells waking dreams to compensate. I guess Morpheus always collects his debts, in time or labor.
I hadn''t even been listening to Andy this whole time. Just reflexively transcribing his waffling story he sold me as "phantasmagoria" until I couldn''t even pretend to listen anymore. It was 11:15 when I sent him on his way with a whiff of rotten wormwood (Devil''s Pressure, from a green bottle). If he''d just waited half an hour, Andy could have had his coveted sip; but I doubt that was what he was actually after.
I glanced down at my notes.
It turns out the slicing ripple was the work of a nutria. You know what a nutria is? It''s this silky-furred kind of water rat, kind of like a beaver with a thinner tail. They originally hail from South America, but they flourish most in the southern United States where they were accidentally introduced. As a result, they''re considered a pest species, shot on sight, hides left to collect dried blood and the juice by-product of rot.
The irony is that they were only introduced to their invasive range as a result of their pelts being valuable, once.
My notes ended there, and I didn''t need any license to determine what Young Andy was trying to say to me. But for some reason I found his cry for help more insufferable than genuinely pathetic; so I wrote:
Patient desperately seeks a clearer form of abuse than the hazy chill his father provided. My professional opinion is that he ought to be institutionalized for his own safety. The world is full of predatory Sphinx-sharks ready to claw the eyes from his Oedipal niche.
All in a day''s work, and I didn''t even have to waste any ether on him. I fed my professional recommendation into a slot in my desk, where it would be shredded, the scraps would be incinerated, and the ashes would be fed to a great beastly beetle named Gregor who lived in the basement. Though, despite the underlying pipes and tubes and furnaces that facilitated this modern miracle, I felt completely alone.
Until there came a knock at the door.
Little Miss (The Mona Lisa As A Self Portrait)
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Deeply/Guiding Principle
I am holder of a power great and terrible. I don''t mean that I have potential for greatness or terrible things; I suppose I do, but no more than the average person. I mean that the power itself effects my life for the best and for the wretchedest. I can feel the future. Not see it written out, but experience sensations before the stimulus hammer falls. It''s a sort of a stringy sensation in an airy antechamber to my frontal lobe, that does not exist outside my own perception.
It''s great because it''s a gift, of course; even this trifling mind deserves better than to be given to an ingrate, and it''s saved me from a million tiny inconveniences besides. But I use it clumsily, still stammering over the consequences of avoided inconvenience. In fact, absent the myriad trials of an inconvenient life, I was freer to contemplate what might trouble me. and in that way was more miserable.
I call this ability Psychicsis, though only to myself; it''s a wretchedly self-clever portmanteau of "psychic" and "psychosis".
For instance: I was once cleaning a bathroom (one of the few jobs I felt fit for, given that it allowed one to work in a hunched silence), and while scrubbing the toilet, felt something possibly slide from my shirt pocket. My hand flew to my breast and seemed to be just in time to save... well, I couldn''t say what, exactly. I only felt it as a small valuable something gone... gone, in a soft plunk down a backwater still unclean given my listless efforts at scrubbing.
Moving on, buffing out water stains from the mirror, I agonized over what I would have done. Trust my own efforts, give my hand into the clear stream tabooed, or play things safe and sacrifice a precious possession? A rational part of me scoffed at the idea of giving up something I care about to a societal eye that wasn''t even watching; the expectation of disgust. With a razor scalpel, heat-cleaned and now cooled, this part of my brain would excise all shame if given the chance; I would become a slobbering blob. It''s best to beat its surgical hand back now.
Trouble struck when I went for a brief walk. A child dropped the ball he was playing with, which rolled into the street with expected magnetism. I strummed the fated string with my presence on the sidewalk. In its lemmingcharge to asphalt the ball bounced against my hapless foot, and I picked it up.
Expectant eyes behind me. I held the ball down, offering in a single hand, loosegripped and steady. Couldn''t yank it away as he went for it, even if I wanted to, which I don''t. I don''t, no matter how much I can feel it about to happen.
"Hold on to that ball," I said, smiling to ward off the malaised air I was sure hung about myself. Still offering.
The child looked at me as though I were a great glassy earwig, or cockroach, or some other filthy verminous beast (thus, however briefly, defining me as the same.) As though he knew the needless cruelty barging about my head. He took and then promptly dropped the ball.
It bounced predictably into the seemingly empty street, but I still couldn''t bear to look. Shamefully I strode on down the sidewalk, head hunched, shoulders achingly high, pretending to be enraptured by some spectacle bound to the earth. Even the (admittedly expected) squeal of too-late brakes could not soften my shameful pace. Spectral whispers of a hastily assembled crowd nagged at me like moth teeth, but I only moved more cravenly, approaching a stork-like stalk. The base of my neck began feeling strained, acrid stink of grass near shamebreaking; still I could not bring myself to look up.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
One ghostly whisper clattered its chain, and stood out from the rest. How horrible. The phantom chorus nodded in rattling agreement, casting metallic judgement: How terrible. Just awful. Such a great shame. Finally, a ghastly wail of condemnation: Shouldn''t we call someone?
Until this moment I hadn''t considered the legal repercussions of my failure to act. I would have sworn, though, that as I walked away from the scene of the accident, a clacking followed with on the edges of my hearing. The beat of beat-cop feet. Closing in, in pursuit; I widened my pace and from the sounds of it so did the fire-eyed lion at my tail. Deer eyes wouldn''t save me now, prey to my own failure to use my power, I picked up the pace further and further but never lifted both feet from the ground at once. For then, witnesses could not claim I was running. Got to look out for number one, so bit the old familiar asp, sourly, fangs pry into a prion ridden mind... Not anything wrong with me just a Power. The enclosing sound numbed the edges of my thoughts; that''s why I might come across more disintegrating than usual. Power aside though; I am usual I swear it.
Lost in ponderance and panic I failed to notice the street softly declining; that''s how decay always goes. Its minuscule at first, unnoticeable and then ignored, until one finds themself lost at the top of a staircase. The sole abyss I refused myself entry into. In a single day I had become an accomplice to vehicular manslaughter and speedwalked from certain arrest and thought untethered thoughts; all the while pretending to be a normal human. True I was uprightwalking, human bones in human skin and featherless; human and yet so much less for my gift... And despite it all I still thought myself (what?)too good for?) this final plunge forth.
So I stood at the stairtop; stock-still in pale daylight, burning as a world does. So wasteful. Taking up heat and not even spinning outside of my mind that doesn''t count. Waiting, with flaming wrists, for cold metal coils to smother cover hold and treasure the lifeveins... but they never came. Never would come.
Psychicsis lied to me again.
Jeffery took the ball from the ragged leery stranger with no incident (I guess looks can be deceiving) and ran over to our stooped social. I and several other mothers and drinks more juice than drink and a stoop. Brief respite; we have to tease relaxation from our constant tensionridden minds chemically and sweetly. God I wish some sweetness besides syrup; wish Jeffery''s father would call when he would miss dinner...
"How horrible," Linda said, noting concerned after the stranger down the street. "People walking about in such a shape, I mean." Breathily she continued.
"How terrible."
"How awful." The exhausted echoes of the worn chorus.
I concluded the sympathetic recital. "What a great shame!" quoth I, in dramatic ironic aplomb.
Oh yes, what a shame; carefree enough to worry about a random child, such a jealous shame. "What a shame." Whispered, again, breathily, recalled Linda. What a performance! We somnambulist troupe were unbeatable and beat; exhausted I mean, ohI''msosorries all around the table.
Odd thing about the streetwise stranger was their gait; not goose-stepping but impressed upon with a posture. Lifted steps and neat shoelaces. I don''t know; you''d expect someone so unkempt to shuffle. I guess they had more energy than they let on, slacker bastard. Own a comb, lazybones. I tried to giggle at my delirious wit and found myself too tired... The young don''t know how good they have it...
Loveless Deathconsciousness
No one tells you how dry it is up here. The food and the air and even the water somehow. The water''s actually not so bad. It''s just that there''s never enough of it for all the exercise I know I should be doing lest my bones and flesh turn into jelly. And you know where we get the water from. In solitary space, we are our own oasis.
For how dry the air is, it''s drier when there is none. No oxygen no hint of no component of h2o just the baking rays or the drying freeze whichever way the cosmic inhospitability goes. It still kills the water. I miss home, by the water. I miss the air and the people and the water that they carried with them. I miss the sweet warm rain and the tears shed over things that seem so stupid now that everything fails, dryly crunches, leaves beneath teeth. I miss plants and the way sap smelled and the way blades of grass screamed and the flowers that turned to face the sun, like me, looking at the sky like me, growing skyward but tethered by their stalks. The only green here is an inky mix of mostly cyan cut with a bit of sickly yellow or sometimes if I''m lucky a mushy sprout or two in these irrational rations. The food is terrible. They expect us to keep active on this steady stream of counted-down nutrients but I can''t even keep it down my body rejects it like Mother Earth rejected all us up here spat us up like a mother bird out into space couldn''t stand to keep us on the dirt anymore. It was our own aspiration that sent us ad astra from the disaster nest. But now all we have is this one lone room one lone oasis, myself, my own worst water source.
We. I wasn''t supposed to be alone. Someone was supposed to be here with me but now it''s just me and the ghost of someone I''ve never met. I talk to them sometimes and they say nothing back. Nothing back yet. When I break¡ªwhen my despondent water breaks¡ªwhen black glass bursts before fire¡ªwhen I go from simply sick to insane, give birth to beings beyond the fuzzy shadows I jump at, become a new oasis. When I bloom. It''ll be a party. When. Delusions are my final hope because if I open that door all the carefully conserved and reclaimed water will just come flooding out in a sludgy puddle and I''ll die and they''ll hate me. I must stink there''s not enough water for a shower and I miss home when I could be clean there''s not even enough water to dampen a washcloth and rid my nose of the crystal remnants of sick. Throwing up in zero gravity is no fun. No matter how hard you try it comes out your nose more than your mouth and noses, suffice to say, were not meant to process food one way or the other. It''s hard to breathe for the parching crumbs. The snot amazes me it''s like crying but who said my nose could hog so much water? It''s as hot and dry as snot may be. Like my guts are metal and this is just the smeared grease keeping the gears running. falteringly, running...This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
If my organs didn''t fail me I''d think I were a body without them. Some punished probe, sick subject of a Russian novel or sleep experiment or spacecraft. Hark! Call me Laika. The stars are my domain. She barked from my window the other day. I forgot I had a window; I forgot there was an outside to see. It''s nice but the light is far too ardent. I miss home. The light was like that too in the day but if I slept past the worst of it like a jerboa or some desert toad the sun would set in soft purple and soft light. It should go without saying the sun never sets up here. Or maybe it''s always set; I can always see the stars. I can always see all the stars, the sun has no mask of mythic proximity to hide behind. The sun here is just another star even though it''s closer, my one and only sole solar solace salience sick sad sanity binds me...
The only other bodies I can see are 1) my own functionally hollow thoracic massive ribcage like a birds I can''t wait for it to atrophy so I don''t feel so full of nothing. and 2) the rusted globe below. You always heard about the planet dying and saw pictures from space of this verdant bluegreen spinning thing, our spaceship, and you felt love and hope. That''s bullshit, they''re all old photographs, our cosmic body is falling apart and we''ll all die accomplishing nothing more prominent than the worse world we''re leaving for the next generation. But what can I do from up here? This is supposed to be Heaven or The Heavens and I''ve never been religious but I feel most powerless in when writ in isolation, in solitude by the sun, in this record no one will read, in this room in space. Being one''s own oasis is useless. An oasis is its flowers, its plants, its trees and their shade and the greenery in the desert but my cosmic body is just as dry as the sun or the rusted Earth with the water I miss. I cannot spare a single tear for a traveler''s canteen; I cannot even cry for myself or the concept of flowers. Mine eyes remain; black glass dry as the outside.