As I Dream

I slapped the parchment with the back of my hand. "I can't read this." 

"What do you mean?" Said the dragon-faced monkey man, scratching his scaly head with his clawed fingers. 

"I mean this is just chicken scratch, literal nonsense." I lifted up the map of Grinzletown directly to their face. It was a mix of a restaurant's kid's menu and the ramblings of a mad man, with towers jutting out of the bay in the shape of lamb chops from some froufrou bistro. With the buildings of Grinzletown made of what I could presume is dark chocolate bricks and wet dirt, it was a miracle this place was still standing, let alone existed. 

The monkey-dragon grinned and pointed at the center of town, a whirlpool shaped like Margaret Thatcher. "There, that's the way home for you." I cocked my head, but my head ended up spinning like a dreidel until I stopped it with both hands. I felt nauseous, but the beast before giggled like well, a monkey. "Spin, spin, spin and grin! Around the corner, home again! Heehee!" When I awoke in a jungle covered in frost hours earlier, this thing stood above me chuckling the same exact way. I wasn't amused then, and I'm not amused now. Still though, I felt strangely fine in their presence, as if fate threw me in the direction of general annoyance. 

I marched ahead, angry at my companion but resigned to my fate. If there was a way out of here, I had to trust in the trickster that found me in the first place. We continued our journey down the green and red bricks, illuminated like Christmas ornaments despite the heat being over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I kept wiping my brow, trying to get rid of the sweat that was boiling like a hotpot on my eyeballs, but it fell like raindrops over my field of vision. The thing that followed me seemed fine, flying on its little black wings and bouncing on its tail like Tigger. It pointed at a large statue of two bottom halves of a human stuck together uncomfortably in the horizon, their voice changing to that of a car navigation system. "Your destination is up ahead." 

When we reached Grinzletown proper, it was a miracle I was still standing, or the town for that matter. Everything was at a slant, crooked by design. It was as if I walked into the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, storybook proportions mish-mashed with houses similar looking to human organs. The stone path toward the center of town beated like a living heart, causing me to trip every fifth step until I fell onto surprisingly soft parts of the rock. The creature laughs, another rhyme I don't find funny, rinse and repeat from the past six hours here. 

The civilians, or lack there of, are not the same as the primate-reptile that giggles at the slightest inconvenience I experience. Instead of animalistic hybrids, beings out of storybooks or a kids drawing, they range from bizarre to incomprehensible. As we pass a small marketplace selling something called "fruit sticks in a jar" and "fart loaders with extra drip," I catch the glimpse of a many eyed George Clooney selling fossilized running shoes. It stared at me for a moment before I turned away, but the color of each eye spread throughout the ultraviolet spectrum. A homeless man, or what I presume to be a homeless man, sat in a pile of stools wearing a mask that looked like Buzz Lightyear, with the eyes blotted out using some sort of putty. It screamed about the end of the world like one of those Time Square freakazoids, but their voice bellowed like it was in a cave, reverberating throughout the town. 

As we approached the center of town, we see a large guard tower of sorts, but not like the ocean towers we had seen on the map. Instead, it took the shape of Brewster, my cousin's dog that bit my ear when I was ten. Twin Brewsters, to be exact. And as we walked toward the gate that separated the two hound-like structures, I started to shiver. The Monkey-Dragon tapped my shoulder, grinning wider than ever before and spoke in a low tone, "you will be found, don't you worry mister." Somehow, that made things less comfortable for me, but I didn't care. I continued on, hoping for some sort of catharsis. 

The gate, shaped like playing cards stained with coffee months before, was guarded by two men that looked...eerily similar to my wife Sharlene. The only difference between them other than superficial things like eye-color and head-pieces, was the extra arm on the left one holding some kind of super-soaker. "Halt, Benjamin Fornieau. State your business," They both said in unison, confusing me beyond measure. 

"I, uh, wanna go home. Like, now." They shook their heads, the guard to the right clicked their tongue and aimed their sword at me, one of those plastic ones you find in your cocktail. I looked to my companion and the monkey-dragon shrugged, forcing me to ask what was going on.

"Isn't it obvious, you can't leave here. It's not your birthday yet." I almost shook my head before remembering what that did last time, "what do you mean? I have to wait till my birthday? It isn't for three months!" 

"Then you'll stay for five months, two more for complaining about our process." The left one was eager to punish me for some reason, licking their lips like a dog in heat. 

"You know what, no." The monkey-dragon suddenly uttered. Before anyone could react, it started bending backward before burping up a fireball into the gate. My wife's clones, instead of burning like a thousand suns, instead turned to stone and crumbled before the gate itself. The whirlpool, now the face of Princess Diana, spat water out of its core and into the sky of Grinzletown, like a geyser at Yellowstone.

I turned to see the monkey-dragon, but it was gone. Grinzletown was gone. The sights, the sounds, the smell of lilac mixed with cow manure, disappeared as soon as it was there. I look ahead once more and just see a door, no gate remaining.

"Ah, I see what it is now." I twist the knob a few times for good measure, and enter the abyss before me.