Chapter 13 Dream
Dream
Lately, I’ve been sleeping too far into the afternoon. It’s causing my dreams to run wild and free, and for once I wouldn’t call them nightmares. Instead, they are deep transient lulls that I nestle into and find much too comfortable to wake from.
Though I am pulled by my want to go see Lir downstairs, it feels like he’s already here between my tattered pillows and sheets.
Those warm hands pressed all around me in a Fibonacci bud spiral.
An anemone going on forever in every direction, the tendrils weaving in and out of my own skin with their translucent swirling.
They weave tighter and tighter until one would not able to separate their beginning from end.
The knots become completely interlocked in a solid chainmail cloak.
The twinkling scales whirling around me like the rings of Saturn that have long enchanted philosophers and poets gazing up through a telescope’s ocular lens.
Whirling in blurred shimmering streaks, the scales are coming in closer with every rotation, eventually liquifying over my entire body in a smooth sentient drip.
Soon, I am once again deep in umber flesh, illuminated throughout like a hand held up to a flashlight.
Though its pulsating glow tries to communicate to me some ominous message, I am simply too tired to care.
Unable to raise my head to even see the light at any angle I could understand its direction or form.
In this place, I rest curled up and am able to find comfort.
No longer moving, just warm and quiet I am able to sleep soundly within my dream.
But, after not long it feels—it could be but seconds, hours or years.
I am rustled by an incoming intruder. A knife is coming in to fillet and splay my fleshy home for all the world to witness my little beating heart.
My surrounding fish’s heart which I am hidden behind is so small, but not so different from my own. Our hearts both have four chambers, four different rooms to hide the most intricate parts of ourselves. What will they see when they cut my house open, surgically slicing through the wallpaper?
In this corporeal diorama, I am a miniaturized version of myself, looking up at the knife and fork crashing through the roof of my organic doll house.
I run away across a bridge of little fish bone ribs, to watch as this whole body is consumed by the lowly lit hands coming down upon me.
I’m not scared. No, not in this dream. I actually want to be seen like this, examined in my complete form.
I don’t want to be hidden deep inside the flesh and fat that wrap all around me. I want…
I then wake up. Every hair on my body rising up like I’ve been electrified with a cold sweat that steadily drips down my spine.
At first, I can’t even hear the gulls, the waves, the wind.
Only my own heartbeat which pounds incessantly.
I rush up to the window and press my face to the cold glass to look down at Lir in the tide pool.
My hair sticks to the pane and across my eyes and face.
Pressing my hands to the frigid fogged glass I try to shock myself awake, desperate to feel anything other than this horrible thumping in my chest. I want to feel his instead, I want to be wrapped up in his arms.
The sound of the wind whips all the way up the spiral staircase.
It knows the path, just as it has blown across the spiraling shells of fossilized ammonites for countless millennia.
It tickles up the back of my legs and cools my fevering chest. Carrying with it not just the breeze, but a soft whisper—a God of the sea blowing a blessing under my door, up the hall, ten paces to the left and across the room.
A soft but commanding sound meant only for my ears—
“Andrea.”