dream deep

We meet at the corner of the house like we used to do all the time before any of this happened. The cat is there, like she always was. The moon is up and they are sleeping. They don’t know who we are or what we’re doing, but we know we have to go soon. I’ll meet you on the porch again tonight, you say. After everyone’s fallen asleep again. Around one, maybe two?

We’ll kill her and take her head off. There has to be pulling and twisting. It cannot be clean. She doesn’t know she has to die, but this is necessary. She has to suffer, or it won’t work. We’ll meet again, you say. And then you disappear. The next morning I wake up and the clock says it is three in the afternoon.

We’re in a line of people I’ll never know, waiting to get into a museum, a house, a graveyard, it doesn’t really matter. Someone mentions a name and someone else retaliates, no, that isn’t it, don’t you know anything? Nobody ever does. I have been here before; I have always been here before. The last time it was almost midnight and the whole world was out to celebrate something I cannot now remember, there were fireworks and fairy dust and streamers and screaming and yells of joy. Racks and rows of seats filled with people speculating and whispering and telling secrets and saying bad things they think they don’t mean.

 There is a musician on the stage, with an oriental sort of instrument, something with strings and plucking and carding and hollow, sweet sounds. And I move back and forth between the spaces and no one notices, I am a ghost, a were-thing, a specter, an abomination, but still I can hear their voices screaming demanding my untimely demise. And over the hollow, sweet notes everything falls and fades, and now we’re back there again, and the echo of the music hangs in the air, can you hear me?