If Dreams could Speak...

      As colors slowly came into focus, I heard the familiar sound of a gun being loaded. The soft cold clinking of the bullets as they enter the clip. Dull hues swirled around me; hardly recognizable figures moving about inside a dark van. I couldn’t control myself, my movements were not my own. My hands danced around a rifle leaning up against my thigh. The men in the van around me were laughing about something, but I had missed the joke. Not that I would have laughed anyway.

     The blurred black and white figures morphed and twisted until they became a road that stretched down a country lane by an old tree. The tree rose up through a dense haze of mist a presided over the entire meadow.

      It was a beautiful sight.

      Then the tree became a house. Dozens of others just like it rose from the shadows along the side of the road. It became a quiet town, in the same melancholy light that seemed to bath all of the images I was seeing in a dull grey tone.

      I gripped the rifle tighter in my hand as if its strangulation was the only way to ease the sins it was about to commit. But my facial expression didn’t change. Almost as if I was frozen in the same emotionless frame.

     I took a step forward to witness the black houses around me turn into dark, musty walls. There was no furniture in the room, and cobwebs hung from the ceilings and in corners. At the far wall, a family sat cowering. The mother gripped her children tightly, tears streaming down her cheeks. The father clutched at the lot of them glaring up at me with the most blatant look of pure hatred. I raised my rifle and took aim. I screamed at myself not to do it.

     Without a moment of confliction, I shot the man in the head. Hot red blood sprayed over the children and the mother and they screamed even louder. A slight adjustment in position and the mother was staring down the barrel of my rifle. Silently, she began to pray. Blood dripped down her face as her lips moved in incoherent syllables. With one quick tap of the trigger, I ended her life. I screamed at myself, pleading to stop. But my words were lost as if a whisper muttered from the farthest reaches of the universe. Tears streamed down my cheeks and yet, my eyes were dead and unfeeling. The children sobbed over the lifeless bodies of their parents. With a few short bursts of fire, they joined them in a bloody heap upon the floor. Without thinking, without caring, I spoke. I was glad that they were dead, if only to keep from suffering anymore from me.

    “Where is your god now?”

     My words were cold but not enraged. Truth was, I was jealous of them. To be able to have so much faith in something to actually believe that it could save you from death was a feeling that I just couldn’t possess.  So I killed them. And I showed them that nothing could save them from death.

      The bodies on the floor suddenly smeared as if they were paint being smudged around a canvas. And they formed a face upon the wall; an image of a beautiful girl with blood spilling from her mouth and from a gaping hole in her head.

      I screamed, both in my mind and in the  dream. I cried out hollowly into the night as the scene changed to a roof of an apartment building. I was on my knees sobbing uncontrollably, tears splattering and darkening the pale concrete.  I looked up to see a town in flames. Buildings were burning all around me. A dead tree collapsed into the side of a house nearby. Countless indecipherable screams were sounding throughout the night.

       A girl appeared next to me. Her hand outstretched as if to grasp mine. I reached for it. But suddenly, the girl was pulled away from me, into a dark shadow that had manifested itself within my mind. I screamed in uncontrollable agony. I felt as If my limbs were being ripped from my body.

      I woke up like that, screaming for someone, or something  to stop the pain.

     Nobody came. I was all alone.

     All alone.

     I squeezed my eyes shut around the tears that flowed from them, hoping to wake up to this never ending nightmare. I rolled and shifted the covers of my bed. My face felt strangely wet. I thought it was the cold sweat that ran like teardrops along my body, but then I realized that my window was open, and it was raining outside. I slowly removed the covers and reached over and shut the window. I rolled back into the covers.

    It was still dark outside, and I could hear the steady patting of raindrops on the window pane. After taking a few minutes to find a decently comfortable position, I drifted back off to sleep.

     I woke up some time later, unable to remember whether or not I had actually had a dream. I sat up, pulling the covers off my body and swinging my legs over onto the hardwood floor. As I sat up, the first thing I noticed was a sharp pain in the pit of my stomach.

    A few moments later I was in the bathroom, dry heaving into an open toilet bowl. My body was cold and shaking, and my head felt like it was being held under a bucket of freezing water. When it was clear that my body had nothing left to give up, I leaned back against the cold white washed wall and stared up at the ceiling. Morning light entered through the small window above the shower giving up a tiny crack of golden rays.

    It was as if the light was trying to reach me, but I had drawn so deeply inside myself that I could no longer feel the warmth of the sun, not coolness of the air, or even the simple comfort of silence.

    Twenty minutes later I left the apartment to head into town

Reviews

[Anatomical Apocalypse]

i really like the way you write about dreams you have a good way of transitioning like in "why children stare" its a jumbled mess of ideas but the way they endlessly flow almost makes sense.