Nightmare

[I thought I’d do something a little artsy for class.  Something dark.]

Heavy.  Smothering.  I search the unseen with nerveless hands.  Strips of ambient light filter through my rictus smile, and I can see unturned stories flipped like stones and watch the startled insects scatter.  Untold tales scuttle best on many legs.  I unstop my canteen lungs to take a drink of air, but instead unvoiced shrieks clatter against the front of my mouth until my teeth hurt and my ears ring.  Am I the only one who hears that? I think as I pop out the earplugs, and am greeted by silence.

I start to move, shifting my weight and pushing my subconscious while waiting for my conscious to catch up.  I don’t know where I am, but every time I close my eyes I learn about it a little more.  A night terror built on a night terror, pages of memory revised into pure confabulation.  So I conjecture an elderly man alone in a tree, catching a bolt of lightning in both hands and yanking god down to the ground below. 

All of a sudden, I am there.  The whirlwind extends but a few meters, and I can only imagine what type of existence lay beyond.  Shredded books like confetti raining down, yellowed tracts of philosophy like a perverse baptism.  A bearded man arrayed in white tug-of-wars with a bearded man arrayed in folds of skin, with the blindingly hot rope of electricity like an arrow assigning blame.  And I realize, I have no idea who’s more real.  Panicked, I backpedal away from the confusion, afraid of the question.  My mouth opens to loose a full-bodied scream, but am shocked into silence when my trebuchet legs snap me into flight beyond the paper storm into a sunnier scene.

I land on my back, my urge to scream squelched by my inability to breathe.  Sitting up, I survey my surroundings.  Summer steam rises from a dirty castle moat, beyond which the heat’s haze rolls congruent with the countryside  I hear the creaking and sqeaking of rusty pulley systems, and my body begins to rise, feet fastest.  Must be a drawbridge.  I slide down its length, landing on my head.  It doesn’t hurt, but I know it should, so I open my mouth to scream.  A hand covers my mouth; shush, he says, and I am surrounded by eclectic people.  Different colors, ages, genders, and bearings, they all nonchalantly file their teeth into points.  It is the whole of humanity and none of it, all at once.

At their feet they had laid piles of weapons–short spears, M1 Garands with bayonets affixed, M-16s, Scottish Claymores.  What are you doing?, I ask them in earnest dread.  We’re eating meat tonight, he says.  You’d best pray.  I remember that I no longer had anyone toward whom to pray.  Ahh, no prayers, eh?  Well, you can scream, now.

I scream until I no longer hear it.  Until tomorrow trembles in the echoes.