.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

My Photo
Name:
Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Convoluted

The explanation started, "I was replacing the water-stained kitchen sink, just because I can't stand to look at it any more...." My anger was not so much that it was MY kitchen sink they were tearing out, without my permission, but that the person had not even come close to removing all the bits and pieces of the destroyed garbage disposal, or the water logged stuff that was stored under the sink. They hadn't even thought to turn off the water main when they discovered that the old shut off valves weren't fully shutting off.

I went out to shut off the water and when I stepped into the garage, I was suddenly not in my house any more. Now I was just furious, because I know that my improvised plumber wouldn't think to see why the water didn't shut off, and might go off to buy a new sink, though they seemed to expect me to do that, so probably not even that much. I looked around and stepped out into the alleyway between the house I just stepped out of and the neighbor's garage. I could touch both buildings with my outstretched arms. I decided to go back in, just to see if I would be back in my own house. Nope, the door was locked behind me. I pulled out my phone to see if I could figure out where I was. It wasn't in English. I could make out some of the words, as they had Latin roots, but wasn't sure what language my phone was in. I went into the settings, English wasn't even a choice. I didn't have a network connection, but that didn't come close to explaining why the phone was unreadable.

In the street, all the vehicles were three wheeled coupes that whined by with a light electric buzz. The people were speaking English, but only some of the signs looked like English to me. I was so obviously confused that I ended up being gently delivered to a local hospital. I'd apparently had a stroke that affected my memory and my reading, but not my speech and hearing. It also seemed to have affected the universe I inhabited. That's when it got strange. The doctor completely agreed with me. It seems my whole body MRI showed that I had a lot of organs in me that they just flat out didn't know what they were. I looked at them and told him the names of everything I recognized (Which was more than I thought.) He showed me what "normal" people had inside, and I was pretty sure they were some sort of androids, as most humans I know don't have nuclear power banks.

Then there was finding my home on this world's equivalent of Google Earth, and taking me there, and the place was abandoned, but the driveway looked well kept, and the hedge and Junipers were not completely unruly. There was a grassy meadow, like I'd always wanted, in place of the front yard. The inside, however was a shambles. Critters had gotten in through the pet door and everything was just piles of shredded dirt covered ruin. "Well, it looks like you have lots to do, so we'll just leave you here." And they did. The whole neighborhood looked pretty much like it normally does, except, no cars on the streets, no sound of people, just the occasional whirring noise which I couldn't locate. I managed to find my rake (The handle too dried up, it had shrunken out of the socket and the head separated the first time I tried to rake a pile of old books towards the door. The shovel was in much better condition, but I had no idea where I was going to shovel all the stuff, so settled for just getting it out of the house into the garbage cans. I didn't even know if there was still garbage service. The drapes in the living room crumbled to dust when I went to open them, I had to scrape grime off the window to see outside. My backyard looked like a combination of MC Escher and James Hubbell, but with obviously alien light sources in the sculpture. (I absolutely can't tell how I knew the lights were alien, I just did.)

There were also cats, but not my cats, though they didn't seem to mind. I started to wonder what I was going to eat, or if there was anything even to drink. I did find some of my cups had survived, though filthy, and oddly, the granite sink, laying on top of the ruins of the counters where the particle board had turned to mush. There was a thin stream of water running out from beneath it, through and under the debris, and then out through the garage along the west edge where it had cut a small channel, then pooled behind the stacks of ceramic tile and left over pavers, where it overflowed a low spot before being absorbed by the rather lush side yard. The fence was long rotted away, but the steel fence pole was still there, rusted and tilted. From the front you couldn't see the flowing brick and glass structure with its alien lights.

This was one of those dreams that had so many tiny details that I can't even begin to describe how rich the atmosphere was with the dank decayed smell of the house and how it mixed with the freshly chlorinated city water. The eerie silence and the low electric buzzing. (Like my electric clock, I'm guessing.) and even the cats and birds were almost silent. The reddish brown sunlight of the town I appeared in versus the fresh light of my own neighborhood, apparently abandoned, but somehow still maintained. (Much of the plantings were wildly overgrown, but all of the hedges were trimmed even with the walkways and driveways, and there was no debris in the street. Even my garage door was perfectly intact looking from the front.

Labels: , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home