nightmares

1. (last night)

We are sitting across from each other, playing a board game. The game is homemade. The board is a series of black-and-white shapes that irreducibly depict houses, sidewalks, trees. The names of the pieces are "Nancy" and "Sluggo." We have been playing the game for some time when it turns inside-out.

It's a very Escher-like event.

We find ourselves walking on a black-and-white sidewalk, towards a black-and-white house, in a black-and-white suburb. We are not Nancy. We are not Sluggo. We are foreigners and aliens, softly pliable messes dragging confusion behind us. The smallest disturbance will transform us completely, before we have the chance to protest.

2. (I don't remember)

I look up, and my aunt is looking back at me. Two perfect mushrooms have sprouted from her eyes, their round white stalks centered over her pupils.

3. (five years ago)

It is a windy day, but we are at the beach, stretched out across from each other on opposite sides of a blanket weighed down by bottles of wine. We are playing chess. We are a little bit drunk. We are also somehow flying kites.

I can't decide on which piece to move next. My remaining rook, for some reason, has grown a series of spikes from the flat edges of its parapets. I feel the need to examine these at close range. "It's nothing," I say. "Harmless." He doesn't say anything, which strikes me as rude. I consider that it might be funny to crack a bottle of wine over his head, but it seems that he has turned to sand. I reach across the board and brush a finger across his eyebrow and he collapses into the beach.

4. (approximately twenty years ago)

I am in bed and I have woken up because of the weight on my feet. I stare into the dark, and the more I stare, the more I see--slowly, slowly--the black mass that resolves itself into a head, shoulders, arms, a skinny torso and knees pulled up in an attentive crouch. Death stretches himself out on top of me and I can't breathe.

5. (approximately seventeen years ago)

I am driving a car, except I don't know how to drive, and it is imperative that I cut a hole in an anonymous chest with a piece of glass that can only be obtained at high speed.

6. (within the last five years)

The canopy is made out of white roses that smell like tuberose on steroids. I am standing under it, and all I can hear is the buzzing of bees, a whole colony of them. If I look up, I can see them, their crooked black legs moving through the petals. I am dressed all in white and I am marrying someone who is wearing a mask. I'm wearing a mask too. We hold each other's hands, but we're wearing gloves, so that doesn't give us a clue to our identities either.

7. (now and then, recurring)

I am being chased and the only avenue of escape is to jump off the roof of a building and fly. This is a possibility, but a difficult and exhausting one, and I know the building is too high. The alternative though is to be murdered in my sleep, so I jump. My muscles wear out quite close to the ground, but not close enough.

faint paranoia, or, delusions of grandeur

Sometimes I feel like the entire world is telling me the same thing. Shouting at me, leering at me, leaning close and murmuring in a confiding tone that, really my dear, you should consider that... It's everywhere, whatever it is, in all the books I pick up, in all the movies I see, in the television, the billboards, the jokes people tell, the maps on walls, the flocking birds, the freeways, my dreams.

I know this is because my mind is dwelling in one particular room. The world is not suddenly obeying the rules of fiction. Narrative is not its design.

But, still.

A few nights ago, I dreamed I was in a show in a small theater tucked away on a dark street. Two friends were on the stage with me. We were dressed in ruffled collars, masks with fake noses, and curious hats. I couldn't decided whether we were Punch and Judys or Harlequin and Columbines. We performed sleight of hand under the glaring lights, except that our juggling balls and silk handkerchiefs kept vanishing out of our fingers, and our bowl of goldfish sprouted miniature wings. Nothing would go right because everything that happened was true. I wanted to cry, but I was afraid that the tears would collect under my mask and slip it off my face. Then I remember the end, when we put on white gloves and held each other's hands to take a bow. The audience was as black and empty as only very large theaters allow, and it made me clutch the hand I was holding so hard that the seams of our gloves indented my skin.

***
There is a man who has been coming to the bookstore who keeps asking me for books of perfect style and unremarkable substance. As long as the style is there, he says, it can have a story that's just ehhh, you know. The strangest part is that he doesn't say this like, I want to read a beautiful book, beauty above all. He says it like he actually does not want to read a good story. I am finding this request boring and perplexing.