La Pesadilla

[A Stream of Consciousness Essay.]

29 de Julio

I was in some awful horror movie, so involved in the plot that I had no idea. I woke up in my dream as Channing Tatum or someone who looked exactly. I was with my best friend (someone also buff and shiny) and we had two beautiful Asian women in their underwear in our bunk beds. Awful B-movie horror jokes ensued.

I was in the military. Must have been because I was in uniform. A jumpsuit. Very Top Gun.

Then I was alone in a room, sitting at a table, I think. Waiting for a meeting, I think. I can’t remember. All I can remember was the quiet. And the bright openness of the house. Well, lit. Everything bright. And something terrible was happening in front of me. But whatever it was that I was forced to watch while sitting in that chair, I forgot, because of what I knew was happening in the other room.

Also well lit. The place looked like a wedding venue. Wide-open windows. Flowers precariously placed. White walls. The collection of noises you might call silence. The wind blowing through the grass outside, a car going driving by miles and miles away in the nearest road… and a fly.

The fly that was lightly buzzing around her head. Her head that I saw through a crack in the door. And I watched it being softly but firmly pressed into the side of the table by an elegant and hairy hand. Only using one finger but with terrible strength, I could tell.

Her little head was squeezed in between the neck of a chair and the side of that table. It seemed like he had been decreasing the space between the two very slowly, maybe for hours. Maybe he got her to fall asleep somehow, I don’t know. Thinking about how she got there makes me want to cry.

The fly was buzzing around her ear, landing every once and a while before buzzing around again. Like he was listening for a heartbeat. That hand, pressing with pompous pronation -pinky flailing out- had a vein popping. He was really putting all he had into it, despite how effortless it looked. That silent noise grew and grew. And grew. Until the only noise was the helicopter buzz of the wings of the fly. And then out of nowhere, it all stopped.

That elegant hand in the deep green sleeve let go, and the fly stopped buzzing.

By this time I was in the room. I was made to move slower and everything felt like soup. At first, her tiny body seemed fine. I pulled back the chair to look at it. She couldn’t have been more than two. She looked like a toy, asleep.

And then, with that same silent noise, her head began to empty of the air within it. I watched it whither and deflate above her tiny tiny shoulders. I began to cry I think, I don’t know though. Her head looked like a raisin. A deflated balloon. Empty. I realized that she had been dead for quite some time.

I looked at the man sitting across from the table. He was small. Dressed as a leprechaun in a dark green suit. But he wasn’t a Leprechaun. Just a small man. A facsimile. An evil mockery. And he was glaring at me, trying to catch my eye, and I realized that was how he got her. With his gaze. It was empty, too. An empty rage, and I could tell he got no pleasure from this. The little girl he just married to death. I could also tell he was not satisfied.

I kept waiting for him to make some move at me, but he never did. He just sat there in the silence. Glaring. Staring back at him I realized that I could resist, but it was hard. Every bit of me was saying go to sleep, little one. I knew that I didn’t have to, but a part of me wanted to. Sitting across from the table now, staring at me too was the little girl, head deflating and hanging like a scab from her neck, and her toy rabbit. All of them looking at me with that glare.

I woke up, but I kept my eyes closed. I tried to keep breathing as deeply as I could. I knew that he represented something I was afraid of and that if I could just breathe it out I would be fine. But I was terrified. I couldn’t do it. I turned on all the lights in my house and watched Youtube until the sunrise. Listened to Life on Mars by David Bowe and skated around the neighborhood. I made some music for my brother and then went to the coffee shop.

I was too afraid to go back to sleep. I still am.