Skunk (his drowsy monotone voiding the ensuing details
of their drama): It was like a one-street western town, like in a cowboy film, a
cowboy ghost town, two rows of buildings facing each other only all the
buildings were burnt out or destroyed in some way except for one, and this one
was absolutely untouched, and had actual glass windows and a low sill in both
the windows, and on the low sills were these really green, really vibrant green
potted plants so that the lower part of both windows was all just… these
plants, and I was hiding behind them and the KKK, or it, I don’t know if they
were the KKK in the dream or what they were but they were on horseback and they
had the pointed hoods and white robes and they were riding down the street with
some of them riding down each side, riding over to each of the buildings and
looking in them because they were looking for me, and very obviously I’m hiding
behind the rows of plants in the only good building, and…
hesitating only now as those elements of the dream
most recently experienced seem to move off from his any attempt at their
remembering.
She listens to him mumble on with rapt fascination, chewing
yet at a long dead pellet of Bazooka gum while remembering herself that disorienting
sensation of emerging from the capricious ether of the unconscious into the
very real in a heartbeat, barely able to recall anything of the murky
hinterland left behind only seconds previous.
ache1: It’s so strange to hear you
Skunk: Hmm?
ache1: It’s like you’re remembering
things, or trying to remember things that never actually happened. Isn’t that…
That’s crazy, when you think about it, it’s insane. You’re not just making it
up, you’re actually remembering it. It’s so… trippy, if that’s
Suddenly aware of himself sweating even in the early
morning’s cool, Brother Skunk kicks at the bed covers to get them off his body,
before trying to continue,
Skunk (more conscious): And it was like I wasn’t
actually watching them from where I was hiding, it was more looking down at
them from above
but he can already sense it fading.
Skunk: It’s… that’s it, that’s all, I must, that
must be when I woke up.
ache1 reaches to her bedside light and
flips it on; until such time as her own dreams might begin to re-occur, these
were the next best thing.
She notices he has a few small brown vinyl flakes
stuck to the side of his face, products of her E.T. doll, the covering of which
is disintegrating and which moves around the bed between them throughout the
night.
Brushing these from off his face, scratching at
those more persistent with her short nails, she suddenly wonders if E.T. shed
his skin entirely how he would look, these the tiny fragments of a chrysalis
from which he might emerge as… exactly what she cannot begin to imagine.
Skunk: In some, in a lot of ways I suppose it’s better to have a bad dream, because then when you wake up you feel better. Waking up
from a good dream into something not
so good is…
ache1 surprises herself by conjuring a
bubble from the gum she had imagined having long lost the elasticity so to do.
Still struggling with the emotional detritus of his
dream, Skunk rolls over away from her to try and return to sleep, and ache1
squeezes one of his buttocks through the pyjama bottoms.
ache1: Oh Skunk you are such a mad, mad bastard
neither of them knowing he remains yet this full,
beautiful, year away from that actual state.
