Cold Painted Walls

This is my worst nightmare - and it’s shaping itself right in front of me. 

In front of me is a chair, a bed, a broken book, and cinder block walls. The walls are cold and rough, I know because my cheek is scraping against it, though not due to my own volition. That part of the cinder block was a milky white, now mixed with red, it’s hue is an odd pink. The bed is creaky and squeaks its protestations. Its coiled bones are very old and rusty with age. Should’a drank some milk, I tell it. I laugh to myself. The bed doesn’t laugh back. I get pushed further into the wall and I curse in pain.

I know I've dreamt about this before, I think we all have if I'm not too presumptuous to assume. The utter horror of being locked in a cage, the guards pacing back and forth their watching endless as we eat, sleep, do the nasty into the metal toilet, sing hopeless off tuned songs, ask our beds how old they are... I think we all dream those dreams. 

And sometimes, those dreams are hyper-realistic. Where you can see the broken book, sleeping open face down as it rests itself onto the bed. I wonder what it dreams of? You think within the dream. And then you pick up the book, peruse it and realize, Oh! You’re missing a few pages, like a man missing his front teeth. A bit gapey but charismatic nonetheless. 

Those dreams, they mean something and I think they mean something different depending on what is happening to you in your real life. Now I ask you, what have you done to dream up such a concoction? Did you steal from your mother’s purse to buy that sweet that you’ve been eyeing for far too long? Maybe you took it a step further and you stole that perfume from the department store, you ran like you’ve never ran before but you still got caught. Now, they slap you in irons and you dream you are serving twenty-five to life because you couldn’t stay away from that eau de parfum. I’ll tell you a secret, it never happened to you. You felt yourself get close, too close to the edge of no return and you panicked. Panicked so hard and so fast that you dropped the prize and ran. And so, late into the night night, after the steak dinner with those sweet golden potatoes, mashed to perfection, topped with the creamiest of butters and paired with a perfect Cabernet Sauvignon, maybe a few too many glasses to keep the jitters at bay, you dreamed you served your time and your conscience, as heavy as it feels, felt relief. The relief that you still have your boring, mundanity as you opened your eyes in the morning and smelled the coffee pre-brewing its good morning for you... 

I’ve explored these walls, the old man bed, the gapped tooth book, all that is left is a knobby chair. And it's one I can’t seem to bring myself to sit in. A chair is a chair. Nothing to fear… right? But the closer I walk to it and the further my little nightmarish cell falls away from me, the true nightmare comes to clutch at my heart. It’s pounding non-stop and I find it hard to breathe. I tell myself to wake up.

WAKE UP!!!!

But I don't. Instead the hands that are leading me down that hall tighten around me and shake me out of that reverie. That knobby chair is knobby no more. Instead it's glistening its own delight of morbidity. Oh, how I wish I was back in the dreamlike nightmare of those milky walls and no privacy. It hurt but it was safe. That wasn’t the real nightmare no - it was just the opening to the dream. I squirm. I kick. I grunt and groan but I can’t shake free. The monsters behind me hold me fast. A knee to my spine, just hard enough to keep me straight.

The real nightmare is in front of me, and I can’t escape it. No amount of waking up will change this. The chair comes closer, it’s steel and cold with a jumble of wires.

I won’t sit there. I won’t... let me wake up, I whimper to myself.

The sack is over my head. Their hands shove me down and lock me into place. 

Some dreams you wake up from. Startled with the heavy silence that follows. Those events, they weren't real were they? You ask yourself as you look around your room and feel the cotton sheets against your skin.

You take a breath, a hand to your heart as it flutters and steadies. 

It was just a dream. You thank the heavens above and you promise yourself to learn from the nightmare.  

But I didn't. And I'm still in it. 

My nightmare means this - everything comes full circle at the end. The girl who wanted perfume avoids the department store all together but sometime during Christmas her admirer surprises her with it but she’s still wracked with guilt. The present sits there, unopened on her vanity table and she stares at it every morning remembering the crime she almost committed. The child that stole the money, they’re in their bedroom locked away for the week or on extra yard duty, overseen by their Watchers, cursing them and the dark pull inside them to take what wasn’t theirs. And mine, well when you burn one individual you can’t expect to not be burned yourself. I took a life that wasn’t mine - what does my nightmare have to teach me?  

The switches are igniting one by one and they’re flipped up far too slowly for my liking. Hold for suspense they tell me. I feel my hair sticking up, my sweat pooling into my cotton clothes and I can barely breathe because this is far too real.

What will the end of the nightmare be, I wonder? 

The electric SNAP comes coursing to me.

Nothing but dread I fear.