something took a bite of me
something took a bite of me
and made off with it
i can’t remember what is missing
but i dream
the edges of its absence
Tag Archives: Dream
The Hell Show
This is a nightmare I had, so it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. I often dream in third person.
This a horror story! Turn away, ye faint of heart!
Before she went to war, she saw her doppelganger in the crowd. It was hiding something bulky under its cloak. Its eyes had a peculiar shine to them. It felt her gaze and looked at her, and she sensed great hate, warning her of things to come. It disappeared in the crowd.
Later, when she tried to tell others about it, they wrote her off as afraid of battle.
Years passed…
She was hanging up laundry to dry late at night. Her stepson was watching TV and she made small talk as she worked, the way mothers do. Gradually she noticed that something was wrong with the channel he was watching. It was a picture of hell. Twisted flesh illuminated in violent orange. Heavy screams.
It leeched all light from the room around her.
She tried to maintain normalcy, changed the station. “Let’s not watch this scary channel,” she said. He waited until she set the remote down and changed it back.
The atmosphere of the room was sapping her. This was the end of her peace. The same darkness she had seen that day in her doppelganger had returned to claim her. She could barely move.
Rolling her head to tear her eyes away from the TV, she focused instead on a coat rack leaning against the wall which she’d planned to mount in the entryway, for visitors. All the wet laundry she had yet to hang. Simple household things which she’d held on to and tried not to take for granted.
A self-protective instinct kicked in. Weak with horror, she staggered to her feet and stumbled into the bedroom next door, throwing herself onto the bed on top of the covers. Absentmindedly she wondered if she wasn’t going to get cold, falling asleep this way. It didn’t matter. As long as she wasn’t forced to watch that channel. As long as reality held fast.
Her stepson followed her. His eyes shone in the very same way her doppelganger’s had. And something else had entered the room with him: the stifling, odious presence of another being, more felt than seen.
“No, no no please,” she managed. It was hopeless. Fear sapped her limbs; paralysis suppressed her fluttering will into taut submission.
The room darkened.
Thick, strangely humid air settled into the room. A small buzzing gnat of mad rationale whispered in her ear, at least it’s warm.
The room was opaque with darkness. There was no TV in here, but he didn’t need one. He was going to bring that hell to her anyway.
The boy went to the window. An ominous brimstone glow limned the solid blackout roller shade.
He raised the shade, and hell was there. An enormous corpselike thing looked through the window at her with dead eyes, a boa constrictor jammed down its throat and wrapping its fetid body in torturing coils. It screamed, impossibly through the snake. The sound was deep, low, primal. The sound of pure evil.
She screamed back.
She screamed until she ran out of air, kept on spasmodically screaming. Paroxysms of wordless pain and terror tore through her, leaving actual tatters. She screamed until every blood vessel in her eyes burst. She threw her head back and screamed until her neck broke.
Her body jittered unnaturally. Her face was changing. She would be one of them soon.
Dream: monsters and corn
This is a dream I had. It’s very random and silly, but it’s all I have written down that I like right now.
The house where we lived was infested.
Repeatedly throughout the day my kids would call to me, crying. “There’s a monster, mommy, there’s a monster!”
I would rush into the room. Whenever one appeared, the air would get strange, heavy, muted, like having ears stuffed with foam plugs or plunging underwater.
I could see the monster’s shadow under the door, or sometimes it would be even closer, about to harm the kids. It was made of twisted purple and raw red flesh, its head was stretched out of any human semblance, and it lacked a face. When I killed it with a slash, it would disappear, and the air would come back in the room.
This happened so much it became commonplace. The kids and I were the only ones who could see them.
One day a boss-level monster appeared. I opened the front door and there it was. It had a wild circular mane of red hair like a lion. Its nonexistent face was an oversized, blank, caucasian smear. It wore a horizontally striped t-shirt and shorts like kids in the 50’s wore, except its body underneath the clothes was wrongly lumped and muscled against the laws of biology.
It moved in glitches. It glitched past me and went straight for the kids, chasing them across the back lawn. They couldn’t outrun this thing. I ran to save them.
The dream changed. I was a boy with corn-on-the-cob hair. I was trying to sneak through the mall unnoticed, but my high school was having a grand parade right through the center. I’d lied to my girlfriend, telling her I couldn’t come to the parade, and she was sure to see me here, so I hid. Having been strengthened by my fights against the monsters in the earlier dream, I stuck to the ceiling and tried to clamber my way to the door. It was really nerve wracking though, because anyone who looked up would instantly spot me.
Then I saw the perfect hiding place: a float with a human-sized cob of corn. My natural camouflage. I landed right beside it, covered myself in corn, and lay as still as I could.
My friend saw movement and suspected. He came over and tried to sweep all the corn off of me. Panicking, and for lack of better options, I responded by pulling more corn over me. This went on for too long.
Then someone woke me up!
Yes, we’d had corn with dinner that night. Also the beginning part of the dream was almost entirely lifted from the beginning of Hogfather, except the monsters were more like Stranger Things. Sometimes I wonder if I ever actually have an original thought.
Well, the corn cob hair might be too dumb to have been thought of before. Anyway… who cares.
Goodnight!
Wonderland
This one was almost too random to share (I have a lot of poems tucked away that are too random to share) but I kind of liked it so, brace yourself, because here it is. It’s got the rhythm of a slam poem.
There are
Gaps
In reality
Starting to fall through the
Cracks
In reality
And I can feel the changes coming
This wonderland
Hasn’t got wonder
Just sand
There are monsters here
Things looking queer
An animal drinking a beer
An over involved
Underevolved
Barrister hamster
Marry me sir
I have to see
What this land can do to me
I want to live
Outside
Of this headfuck
We can do it together
Together you can pull me
From this
Alternate reality
Life isn’t supposed to be
A sleeper city
With sleeper people
We need release
We need to be free
Please
Jesus
Sees us
But he won’t believe in us
When we ask him to help
He cries a single tear
And walks away
This hurts me more than it hurts you, he says
And we bleed
We bleed bleed bleed
We planted a seed
And it’s come to fruition
It’s perdition
Retribution
Karmic condition
This is our reality now
We contrived it
Now we have to
Survive it.
The cave
Based on a nightmare I had.
heavy cave walls
darkness pacing around me like a panther
trapped between two tiny chambers
each tunnel leads to the same dead end.
hope is a small bead of light in the rock
just big enough to see air, freedom,
my family.
they leave, unaware of my absence.
forced onto my belly
crushed by immovable stone
i realize the terrible truth of my situation
i will have to wait in this hole all night
i am so far from the path that
i may never be found.
the air was thick but now it’s smothering
i scream
one long cry for help
one expression of fear
when my lungs are spent
the black echo hooks its claws in my thin hope
shredding it to tatters.
the cave closes for the night.
one by one, the floodlights shut down.
I woke up with the pillow on my face, threw it off, and took the sweetest gasp of air I’ve ever tasted.
Fresh Hell 