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Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee
I used to have vivid dreams. Then I didn’t, but lately I’ve been having them again. Some are nice, some are less so. When I was 15, I often got lost in a blustery black-and-white mansion where I talked to the lanky butler.
Dreams are the only times I come in contact with violence. Even there it’s rare, but sometimes it gets me. I was living in Chapel Hill. I had a flat, and three friends lived with me. The friends’ faces changed throughout the dream so sometimes I’d be talking to R, or E, or the girl who sat behind me in sophomore English. Whoever they were, they were always friends.
Here’s what happened: there was a man in the closet. He wore shorts and a tank top. He’d twisted a hooked whip from our coat hangers. He crept out one evening when there was silver moonlight. We didn’t have curtains, or beds, or separate rooms, so all of us were sleeping on the floor. One by one, the man whipped and strangled my friends until I was the only one left. I woke up, he saw me, he ran out of the apartment. It was morning. In bright, brilliant sun, fresh dawn, dew on the heads of every neighborhood ladybug, I chased the man. I was running along Franklin Street in my pj’s and people were watching. The man wasn’t sprinting, wasn’t jogging, he wasn’t afraid of me. Crowded crosswalks or alleyways, I couldn’t catch him, but I knew that if I did I’d beat his bones to powder, his eyeballs to breath, sweat, damp air.
Though it wasn’t a nightmare, I didn’t like the dream. It stuck with me when I woke up. Not so much the midnight horror, but the things I wanted to do to our attacker in the daylight. There’s a bit of a beast in all of us, no matter how little blood we let ourselves take.
Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller
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My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
Livesay Writing 