Black and Blue

I am lying in bed. It is late morning, approaching noon. The light from the sun is clear and warm through an open window, and the whole room is ignited in white. 

As I roll over onto my side, I realize that I am not alone in my bed. I am greeted by the gentle curves of a woman’s body beside me. Her face is guarded by a wayward arm, but I know who it is. I take a moment to soak it in, to linger on the reality of this scene. 

After a while, she wakes up. Our eyes meet, and she smiles. Arms entwined, we embrace each other, softly rubbing noses together as our faces move in and out of focus. It is then that we hear movement and voices outside of our room. I sit up, instantly alert and nervous about the situation at hand, but then I feel her soft touch on my back, and slowly fall back into the milky bedsheets. 

We softly giggle as they move around, up and down the hall on the other side of the door. She puts her fingers to my lips with one hand, caressing me with another. I softly kiss her, slowly working m way down along the curves of her body. 

As I reach her navel, I open my eyes to see a big, purple, blackened bruise. I look up to see her response, but she doesn’t notice, doesn’t react to my touch. She just lies there. More bruises appear along her side, her belly, and her legs. I caress her, but there is still no reaction. She just smiles down at me.

The door is shaking, loosening its hinges. Soon, it will fall open under heavy weight. I bring myself up to meet her gaze, and I kiss her strongly one last time.

Discarded Man

A chill, autumn evening greets me as I stand before an intimidating wall of trees. The cool breeze blows the dead, dry leaves over the tops of my shoes. I look over at my best friend standing beside me with his hands in his pockets, and he gives me an encouraging nod to make my way into the forest. 

Fast forward a ways in, and the sun is on the verge of slipping beneath the slopes and bringing night upon us. I don’t know where we are going, but the steady incline gives me a weary feeling, and I’m not sure where it will level out so that I can rest. My friend moves ahead, and I fall behind. 

It is at this point that I feel the ground soften beneath me, and it becomes increasingly more difficult to pick up my feet and carry on. I look up the side of the hill, and my friend motions for me to keep going. He is so far ahead of me now that he is disappearing into the shadows of the trees. 

Finally, night is upon us, and only the washed-out blue remnants of day remain. I have a flashlight, which I switch on in order to see. I hold the light out and find that my friend is nowhere to be seen. All is quiet. When I try and call out to him, my voice cannot be heard, no matter how loud I try to be. 

It is then that I feel a firm grip on my lower leg, pulling me downwards. I turn to see long, metallic fingers grabbing me, and those fingers belong to a man made of scrap-metal, garbage, and other discarded items. His arms and legs seem to be molded from old crutches, and dark clothes are stretched over his body. He, too, is struggling to climb the hill, and using me for support. I try to shake him off, but he does not let go. He grips me with his other arm, and I bash him with the flashlight, but it is no use. He simply will not let go. 

I look up ahead of me to find my friend again, and this time is standing only a few feet from me. He is looking at me calmly, nodding ahead and motioning for me to keep up. I can only look at him and shake my head as the discarded man drags me down.

Connected Stories

Dreams connect us to other realities.

When we dream, we look through the windows in our minds that allow us to see into our parallels lives, our concurrent existence, through many unified bodies. All of our lives, all of our actions... there are millions of instances, variables, possibilities that can be experienced simultaneously. Unified bodies and souls molded in different ways by time and experience. Our dreams are where we are truly awake to our existence in the universe. When I say, “we,” I refer to all of me, each variable of my existence that breathes in another plane of time and space.

When you experience a nosebleed, it is because one of those other lives has come to an end, in one form or another. Children experience many nosebleeds as they grow and change, and it is because they are more sensitive to these tethers.

We are all connected in this way.

I had a dream once as a boy, where I got in a fight with a bully on the playground. He punched me in the face, and I fell backwards onto the ground. When I hit the ground, I awoke in my bed, and my nose was bleeding. I could see the face of the kid, but he wasn’t anyone I knew. I still remember all of this clearly. It is my belief that this was the experience of some other self, and part of it reached through that window in the dream of my mind’s eye and collided with my own existence.

It is my belief that we all experience these shared, connected stories.

Fire and Pain

I am standing by the train tracks behind a house that has belonged to my family for generations. It is a the bottom of a long, shallow hill. The tracks go onward to my left and right, running away into my periphery. All that there is to see, is myself and my family on this summer evening. 

The sun is setting behind the tree up on the hill, and the sky is illuminated with the fading hues of blue, orange, and violet. The air is cool, but humid. I can feel the presence of family members around me, both close and distant, but through the fog of my dreamy eyes, I cannot see their faces clearly. It feels as though this is a special time. 

And then we hear it; the sound of metal rolling on metal, the evolution of a primitive devise employed by man’s lust for progress. The train car flies by with incredible speed, much too fast for the era it belongs to. It is a caboose, the antiquated-style seen in so many westerns and adventure movies. It is the last thing you see as a loving hand waves goodbye and disappears in the void of time. However, this particular car is empty. As are the other, numerous caboose cars that scream past so quickly every minute or so. My family and I laugh and cheer. This continues for some time, as it happens in dreams, until there is a noticeable lapse in time, and the event has worn out its welcome. 

At this point, I look down the tracks to see yet another car coming down the tracks, only this one is spewing flames from its doors and windows. I then hear a sound from the opposite end of the tracks, and turn to see another caboose roaring down the way. There isn’t much time to react, as they are upon us in seconds, colliding with such force that shrapnel and debris are flung about. I hear yelling and screaming amid the explosions, and I duck and cover as best I can. 

The next thing I know, I’m inside a house - not sure which, though it doesn’t feel like the one from before - that has caught fire and everyone is fleeing to get out. People are in a panic, and grabbing their things as fast as they can, tripping over themselves in the process. The walls are covered in flame, and I’m pushing people out, yelling at them to go outside. The last thing I remember is seeing people flee the house through a doorway wreathed in flame, and I feel the scorching heat on my face.