The Island of Tortured Crops

The land is plagued by daemon. They torture the people of the rock. I run away on a maxi-taxi horse with no name. I run from the country to the old neighbourhood to escape the legions pursuing me.

I must enter a strange and unfamiliar house. I must lock each door as I enter each room. This will slow them down, but stop them it cannot.

I reach the last room. In that final room, behind the last door there is a man tied to the post of a tree. He is just a man, and only an example of any other man. I must torture him to free myself. I take up the blow torch and I cleave the skin from his flesh with one hundred percent accuracy. As if it were practiced. As if it were writ. As if I were already a daemon myself.

The flesh glows orange in the wake of the torch like the coals and embers and fires of hell. Blood pours from the open chasm of those wounds like a river from the urn of life.

I must tie the man even more in an attempt to bind and lock the door. The moment I finish, the moment I turn to the door, the one leading to my freedom, the daemon pursuing me enters the room.

He tells me to keep walking, to keep moving and to never look back, and this I do gladly. The moment I cross the threshold however, I feel the tide shift, and I hear him beckoning me to return.

I keep walking. I do not so much as hesitate. The humans, the tortured, are scattered across the land, are scattered across the country, are scattered across the world.

They move in mysterious ways, full of electricity and energy, full of intensity and spark, dashing and shivering like lightning, only to slow, only to stop, their movements becoming stiff as they strike myriad poses, like flies, like dead things, only to zoom away once again.

The grace and fluidity of life has been bled from their bodies, but the bodies remember the song. The daemon find this dance and drama amusing, for they are the farmers, and they have harvested well. We, the mere crops, have been reaped and have been yielding.

This is the end. The scene is dead, the story is dying and so is the small world on the stage. Here halts the dreaming. Beautiful nightmares to you all...

King Kong and the Magick Flute of Humanness

I am being chased by a crazy and enfuried gargantuan ape. It is a typical dream of pursuit and so I skip to its end. He is holding me over a towering cliff of a green, fern-coated hill and just before he crushes me, drops me, I whip out a magick flute an play a weird and whimsical melody. Truly bizarre. Surely fae. He is at once transformed into a human, with giant, meaty, hefty, fleshy-coloured hands in which I am still flailing. Yet somehow, I manage to push him over the edge, while I remain at the peak of that precipice, looking down on him flailing as he grasps a knotty knoll, a colossal grassy root that can take his super-human weight.

Out of nowhere, leaps a strange lad who snatches the flute from my hands and trips over the edge of the cliff face with it. I looked below me to see him land in the King’s outstretched palm, and I know, sure as anything, what is about to take place. He will play my odd little melody backwards, and in reverse, and restore the meaty manimal beneath me to his original form and fury. I turn to run even as I hear the bizarre melody backward and the enraged roar of a man turning into a beast. The pursuit is on once again and I return from the dreaming to awaken. May the dreams of fae befall you on this night ...

Of small towns and first loves

A man goes back to visit his hometown, a small town, with his new, beautiful wife. She wants very much to be a part of his story, to belong to his home and his life and his world. But he ignores her desire, and one day she finds out why.

He used to play sports with all of his friends, most of whom were male and one of whom told her that one of them was not; his first love. She played sports with the guys, with him, on the team. And she was the reason why he couldn’t include his wife. His wife did not belong, was not a part of the memory of the past that he shared with his special and significant someone else. She was only the present. Only ever the future.

The moment she is told, she understands, she is envious, and she accepts. You loved her. You must still like her a lot, and she must be so beautiful, god damn her, I must like her too. She must be the kind of beautiful that makes you love a person instantly and for always. Something of this reminds me of a Mandy Moore movie.

Shortly, briefly after, there is a terrible accident. One around the pillars in which the scene is set, in which the dream is lain. I don’t know why she ... there is a terrible accident ... and a train runs off a bridge. Part of it lands up right on a perpendicular bridge and another part of it slips and slides and skids down between the two bridges, and swings back and forth like a clock’s pendulum in the curve of an upside down arc below.

The wife is on the bridge when it happens but that is not when she dies. She stands there, waiting, for the second carriage, the one that swings like the pendulum beneath the perpendicular bridge to swing free. It swings back and forth and it comes back again, and every time it does, the space between the two bridges widens even more.

So she stands there waiting for the space to widen and for the carriage to swing free, until that very last swing, where it doesn’t and she knows, all hope riding on that moment, that if it was to swing free that it would have had to have been then.

She knew that if it didn’t swing free then and there, it would be the end.

The first carriage of the train, the one standing upright, falls flat upon her and the perpendicular bridge, taking her, taking it all, along with the second carriage of the train swinging in the curve of the arc beneath, down below into the water, and even further below that. I feel the impact, I feel it crush, and tear, and break, and mangle her body, and I hear her release ...

The softest cry of pain as she sinks beneath the surface of the waters, and dies, and is gone for always.

The man watches from the other bridge, powerless to save her, and he asks himself why didn’t she move, what did she wait for, why did she allow the choice to be taken out of her control, why didn’t she move herself, for herself, why didn’t she move. They had a baby girl. A daughter who’s now motherless because her mother was too weak.

Too weak to move, too weak to make the decision for herself, too weak to make the choice. Too weak.

Now he runs over his memories of their short, brief time together in his hometown, the way he ignored her, the reason why. He flashes back and he feels as if life has come to an end, because his life has come to an end, now that hers has.

And he’s walking and he’s numb and he passes his first love. She is an exotic daylight dancer. He looks at the small triangles of her breasts, and at the varying sizes of the triangles of the breasts of all her fellow dancers. Topless and beautiful, they sit in an obento box, wearing brightly-coloured, floral-printed skirts; and he remembers his new, beautiful wife and what she said.

You loved her. You must still like her a lot, and she must be so beautiful, god damn her, I must like her too. She must be the kind of beautiful that makes you love a person instantly and for always. Something of this reminds me of a Mandy Moore movie. She is the reason why. She was the reason why.

He remembers her attempt to be included in his home, and in his life, and in his small town, hometown world, and he ignores the memory of her words the same way he ignored her. The dreaming ends and I awake with an aching sense of loss and grief for these people.

People I’ve never met, people I’ll never meet, in all of my life.

(And it prompts me to send asinine, exceptionally inappropriate and utterly unnecessary text messages in the dead of 3:50 a.m. in the early morn.)

Sweet dreams ...