Monday, Mar. 07, 2005 - 20:12

Hello gentle Reader.

The following is a dream I woke from this morning… I was walking down the hallway towards the living room/dining room area. On arriving in the living room, I was struck by an unexpected – and highly undesirable – sight.

Simon was seated on a beanbag, sitting only a couple of feet in front of the fish tank (which I always referred to as the ‘whale tank’, on account of its size). I noticed, too, that the gargantuan TV he’d bought was also present in the other corner of the room; indeed, the living room was as it had been when he’d been living here.

Simon didn’t seem to notice me. His gaze was fixed intently on the fish tank. He seemed so mesmerized that he’d forgotten even to breathe.

I took a couple of hesitant steps towards him. “How did you get in here?” I asked, sounding more fearful then I would’ve liked. But he didn’t answer. He didn’t react to my voice or presence at all. He merely continued to stare into the fish tank. I followed his gaze and felt sick by what I saw.

There were no fish in the tank… but there were eyes… six of them… bobbing about in the water staring back at me. Not human eyes but cats’ eyes.

I suddenly looked around the room, filled with a certain anguish and dread… and sure enough, I spied my 3 cats, Taylor, Tiggy and Parker… how had I not seen them earlier?

They were alive and they were walking around the room, mewling in pain… their eye sockets empty; they bumped into one another blindly, and clumsily collided with furniture… they fell over themselves and one another, beside themselves with pain and terror.

I looked back at Simon but he was gone. The beanbag was empty. And as I turned around, the room changed … structurally it remained the same layout, but the off-white walls became ancient, unpainted weather boards; all grey and warped and twisted with age, leaving gaps through which the night seeped in (which was especially odd as these are interior walls). The room was filled with pipes and poles and rolls of wire, all generously smothered in cobwebs, grime and dust; the smell of oily rags and rot was heavy in the air.

I made my way to the hallway door feeling confused and disorientated, but before I reached it, something emerged from the doorway that made me stumble backwards in fear. The features were certainly Simon’s, but it was as if he’d been Hulk-ed or something (as in the comic book character); his body had been blown up way out of proportion; he stood a good 10 feet tall, his head the size of a wheelbarrow, if not larger.

He had to really push himself to get through the doorway, such was his bulk. And then he stood there glowering down at me, sneering. He either said something or growled like an animal – either way, it was enough to catch the flash of his teeth, which seemed to be comprised of a combination of jagged pieces of glass and steel fangs.

He reached towards me with long, thick arms that ended in hands as wide as a car tyre and fingers as long as my forearm but twice as thick…. I couldn’t hardly breath in his grip, and it felt as though my ribs were going to snap. He held me close to his face, forcing me to look into huge black eyes filled with rage.

"I can’t tell you what I feel… so I do things for you, Jay, you know that? But even that wasn’t enough, was it?” he hissed with fury. “You didn’t want my gifts… you sent them back or threw them out… when all you had to do was stay dead, because that was my best gift of all, Jay… the one that meant the most. You threw it back at me. Every day you’re still alive, you’re throwing it back at me. You should’ve stayed dead… They won’t give me my Ph.D. unless you do. No more projects will come my way until you stay dead.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Please, don’t do this…” I begged.

“Your Nine Lives are used up, Jay. No more Second Chances. Next time you keep my Gift…” Even as he uttered the words, I realised we were now in my bedroom and I was laying on the bed, this huge monster on top of me with a pillow in his enormous hands, at which point I had the thought: ‘For fuck’s sake! Just get it over with already!’

… And then I woke up.

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