My dreams lifted off me like a sheet of cellophane. Misplaced desires and directions from the night clung to me still though my eyes were open and taking in the morning light that fluttered through a part in the curtains that were hastily closed the night before. The names of old friends were in my mouth and I addressed them as if they had been there moments before. Nebulous feelings of peril at the hands of some unnamed entity, at some very real and definite evil working its plans upon my dreaming self, left me with a vestigial terror that had no object or reason, and became all the more terrible as I sought my mind for what it had been but only came up with blanks, with an urgent pause of anxious thought that slowly bled away into reason, into a relaxing of my tensed muscles as I resumed the more predictable and comforting modes of wakefulness. Then every last detail of that dream left me forever, save for a streak of menace that rung in me like the harsh crunching of cellophane being balled up before it’s tossed aside. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to be back here, after so many years this town that I had known well had become strange to me. Once familiar places now echoed anachronistically with the things of intervening times that I had not been here to see. My memories were hazy and indistinct. I got up out of bed and stumbled over to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. The last thing I remember of this place before I left it was the oak tree outside my old house, the squirrels that ran underneath it in the midst of their chatter, the barbed-wire fence with tall grass beside, a penny in the driveway glinting like a jewel in the sun, the rusted out chevy in the side yard, the shed out back filled to brimming with shaved ice and volcanic ash,
