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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,
the towering rose bushes with green and amber blooms, the weather vane atop the house with Christ on it pointing his cross in the direction of the wind, a lone sand dune making its way across the pasture, a flock of iridescent parrots squawking and pecking gayly at the tattered denim jeans of a partly skeletonized corpse caught in the thorns of the roses, the pool of mercury and the lilly pads that grew thickly on it, the piles of antlers being raked up into huge heaps by the help who smoked long churchwardens and cursed the meaning of laughter as they worked, the hundreds of old coats of arms that we had used to shingle the roof, the whale beached in the quarry with anacondas burrowing inside voraciously writhing while it moaned its last sad testaments to the world of the living, a cow with prosthetic ovaries and a policeman inside it up to his shoulder uselessly trying to inseminate it with a fist full of thyme and copper ore, the termite mound shaped like a christmas tree, the thunderous high-pitched whine emanating from deep in the ground, the mailbox with its red flag put down, my father on the porch clutching thoughtfully at his abdomen where his pancreas had been before it was lost in the fire, his old blind cat beside him reading a dog-eared braille newspaper with its tail and front paws, the scruffy beards growing from the eves like ice-sickles while roiling trails of ants scavenged for the bits of food stuck in them holding tiny protest signs that we never could quite make out, the rusty windmill draped festively with fermented seaweed and loops of fresh tank-treads, the proud American flag spread with peanut butter wetly flapping in the wind, the cavern with Corinthian columns growing in crystalline clusters dripping with warm milk lactated from breasts drooping from the cave ceiling, centaurs... no, centaurs don’t exist, horses with tiny human eyes meandering around in their sockets like snails in the rain pausing now and then to nibble on eyelashes... no, horses don’t exist, the court of law operating in the middle of the road with its bailiffs patiently explaining to angry truck drivers why they would not be able to pass until a verdict was reached, the ocean undulating peacefully in the distance, the kettle of guided missiles lazily circling in the sky spouting contrails that spelled out cheerful greetings in the air, the old women carrying away urns balanced on their heads full of puppies from the well, the great frothing beings that possessed old garden tools and made them whisper hymns about the fictional poets who had written them on panes of stained glass with a penknife in dead languages they had taught themselves from a single found manuscript bound in gaseous ether that made it impossible to read for more than ten seconds before passing out and entering into a fugue state for several years until they remembered what they had been doing and then came back with a gas mask and stayed up so late reading that they had to light a candle to see by that sparked the ether and birthed frothing beings with affections for garden tools, the tire swing swaying gently from the oak, and now what had become of them? I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a sip.