Kyle (partial. rough draft)

KYLE

“So,” she asks me, “how did that make you feel?”

I stare behind her head and imagine a black, swirling void. It is a black hole and everything it touches is reduced to nothing. It remains fixed above her head, tendrils of darkness lashing out like an enraged squid. Everything it strikes disintegrates into a cloud of specks and then, nothing. And then the arms of the void destroy the wall behind her and the world floods into this space in a manner so overwhelming I can finally feel my eyes widening in surprise. An ocean of noise and torrents of color erupt from the tears in reality that this black hole has opened and I remain seated, gripped in a rising panic that threatens to end everything. A seagull, one wing melting as it flies overhead, barks like a dog and splatters like a spent raindrop as it collides with the wall I’m seated in front of. Large, yellow eyes glower from the black hole that has now grown to the size of three moving vans and-

“Kyle?”

I blink. The world is whole. I am seated in her office of muted blues and grays. Her various diplomas and certificates of accomplishments hang on the wall behind her. A computer rests on the desk of tempered glass she would sit behind when she was between patients. Now she’s seated in a simple armchair, one bare leg crossed over the other. A pair of thin, black-framed glasses rest on the bridge of her nose. She is plain, uninteresting.

“What was that?”

She straightens in her chair; jots something down in her legal pad.

“I asked how that makes you feel. We were talking about your friend, Jenny.”

“She’s dead,” I say, simply and without feeling. This is the most basic truth I can tell her.

Earlier, before coming into her office, when I was sitting in the lobby, I went into the bathroom. In the stall someone had scratched “Jenny likes rough sex” and “She sucks cock in Hell”. A wave of complete and utter sadness overtook me. With tears streaming down my face and snot dripping in ropes out of my nose, I scratched into the lines underneath them: “JENNY WAS A FRIEND OF MINE”. And then, unable to handle the whole affair, I popped a Firefly. And then fifteen minutes later I’m back out in the lobby, staring at my feet, which were by then glowing like two elongated suns.

“Yes, she is.”

She says this, tilting her head to one side. She looks at me with some concern.

“While it is perfectly normal to express an outward appearance of apathy, you must be feeling something underneath it.”

She pauses for a moment and continues speaking when she realizes that I have nothing to add.

“Think of it as your mind taking all those bad, nasty feelings you might have and wrapping them up in a giant cocoon. WHOOSH!”

She makes a wide, flamboyant gesture with her hands that is, I guess, supposed to resemble a cocoon being spun.

“All those bad feelings are kept prisoner, allowing you to go about life seemingly close to normal as possible. The problem, Kyle, is that while you go about your life, those feelings and emotions keep getting collected in this cocoon. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it just BOOM!”

She claps her hands together.

“Now Kyle, what I’m here to do, what we’re here to do, is to slowly unravel that cocoon of negative emotions and let them seep out gradually. If you let them fill until it bursts, well, it greatens the risk of harm you can do to yourself and others. So, tell me, how does that make you feel?”

Somewhere between her first mention of the word “cocoon” and her grand slap, small moths began to spew from her gaping maw. Their wings were a pale blue, with bright, white quarter moons emblazoned on them. They flew in a swarm around her head, buzzing and moaning as she spoke.

“I know this must be hard. Having to come face-to-face

----

It's funny how I can type that out in a quick ten minutes and then, just as quickly as the dance was going along, I go and trip over my own feet. I have this grand vision in my head about how all this is going to play out. I mean, who doesn't want to read a murder mystery ripe with disillusioned, spoiled, super dramatic, self-absorbed, drug-taking, alcoholic, sex-craved, idiotic children? And maybe I'll even throw in a little Lovecraft into the mix. I mean, a story isn't complete without a little reference to the Cthulhu?

I'll finish this tomorrow. I've got the soundtrack down.

Suspiria: A Review

Netflix is probably one of the greatest creations to have come along since....well, since whatever has come out recently that isn't as great as Netflix. I think I'm gonna turn this into a madlib and let you (whoever even reads this dribble) fill in all the blanks with wacky words to make crazy, but pointedly hilarious sentences. Anyhow, Netflix.

My "Insta-Watch Queue" has close to about 80 things sitting in it, collecting cyber-dust. Wonderful titles like "Evil Dead" and "Yojimbo" sit patiently waiting for me to move my ass from my desk chair to my bed so I can watch them and be happy and lazy and sleepy and all those other things watching movies while laying in bed makes me. So. Last night as I'm flipping through the 80 items in my queue (having at one point scanned the newly added sections and contemplated adding in like 14 more things I know I'll never watch), I come across a little horror "gem" called "Suspiria" that so many on Netflix have hailed as "quintessential horror for the horror buff". Naturally me, being the horror buff that I am, jumped all over this 1977 film like ADHD-crack headed children jump in one of those bouncy things.
The cover is, I think, a little misleading to what the movie is actually about. It shows this all-white silhouette ballerina with a huuuuuuuuuuge pool of blood in the area where her shadow would typically be. Okay, so maybe not THAT huge. I digress. The movie has, for like 5 minutes tops, ballerinas dancing about. Other than that, you probably forget it's even taking place in a school for those freakishly skinny, fugly toed misanthropes. Or that it takes place in Germany for that matter, other than this one instructor, who thunders about like an ogre (and kind of looks like one too, although she dress in black and things non-burlappy) speaks with a German accent and has her hair done up all German-like in those double bun things and did I mention already that she looks kind of like a man? German women are actually men right? Or did I get that wrong? I mean, there are some German women I might find myself in bed with, but that might be because I think they're men? Again, I digress. (At this point my conscience would like me to point out that I bear no ill toward German women, ogres OR ballerinas. Well, I might have a little distrust of ballerinas...)

<----- just your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill, batshit crazy ballerina enthusiast.

Gosh, where was I? Oh yes. An American woman played by an American actress gets summoned or invited or called (however they get unsuspecting American women to fly in the middle of the night in a terrible storm) to Germany to attend (I assume) a very prestigious dance academy. Oh yeah. This movie was directed by Don Argento, who is (according to critics) a very influential Italian horror-filmmaker (film maker?). As the opening credits role, a narrator comes on to tell us that this American girl was asked to come to Germany to attend dance school. I guess either Mr. Argento felt American audiences were far too stupid to figure out why the girl is there (even though it is brought up again 10 minutes later into the film) or that the opening credits needed to keep us enticed with something other than the names of people we could care less about.

Right away I knew something was wrong. The American girl (I can't even remember her name) gets off the plane and exits the airport. Argento shows off his quirky camera skills by focusing in on some random things. Like the sliding doors to the outside. OoooOOooo, SCARY! Then again, maybe automatic sliding doors were something of a terror back in those days. I mean that show, Rescue 911 sure did a hell of a job keeping me scared about exiting/entering onto an escalator! So, after some odd camera shots and ridiculous, over-the-top, screeching music (the music for the movie had some contribution from a band called "Goblins"), she exits the airport and into one hell of a crazy storm.

She trails very hard to hail a cab and it seems the Germans aren't as willing to taxi people like our friendly New York cabbies, because they just excelerate and get her even more wet when they splash water on her. When one finally DOES stop, after pretty much throwing herself onto the cab, he doesn't even bother to help her. He doesn't even listen to her when she tells him where she wants to go. He doesn't even engage in that awkward small talk I imagine people in cabs have all the time while waiting to get from point A to point B. Nevertheless, I have resolved that, if I make it to Germany, I shall never take a cab. At least, not one from 1977.
The girl is then deposited at the dance academy. While she is lugging her two bags out of the car, a very frantic ballerina girl comes rushing out of the building. She brushes past the new arrival and goes prancing off into the stormy night like I imagine most ballerinas would do. So graceful. So creepy. Well, the American girl (I have just now gone to IMDB.com and discovered that the one I keep referring to simply as "The American Girl" is actually "Suzy" and she is played by some woman named Jessica Fletcher. I mean, Jessica Harper.) isn't even able to get into the building because some other woman (who speaks perfect English) doesn't know who she is and can't be bothered to let some other woman into the building during the middle of a horrible storm and it's probably due to witches.

Yes. That's what this movie eventually boils down to. You have to sit through 60 minutes of very weird camera shots that I think were intended to create a sense of displacement or craziness or something like that, but really just seemed....well, disjointed to a point where it was silly. Oh. And the music. Crashing cymbals, industrial noises, random beeps and bops, screeching whatever instruments and occasional screams do not add to suspenseful mood. They just add to my eventual liver failure because I have to down Aleve to get rid of the headache. I'm sure the Goblins are wonderful people, but they need to not do whatever it was they did in this movie because it was not. good.
Also, I think Mr. Argento should have just shot the whole thing in another language. I mean, most of the non-essential cast were from Italy. The movie takes place in Germany. In a prestigious, creepy dance school for witches. Harry Potter and the Wicked Tutu? Lame, I know, I know. And I could still barely understand what most of those women were saying.

I also think that there wasn't enough dancing. I mean, I know I mentioned above that I am not a huge ballerina fan, but he could have really done something to make it extra creepy! I mean, this is Germany! This is a school for weird people who think mutilating your feet is awesome! This is a place where the leader of the school is a fricking old American woman who also doesn't dance! The only dance instructor is, like I mentioned above, a freaking huge-ass tree of a (wo)man who also doesn't dance! Did I mention that her sidekick minion is some mute Romanian giant with a fascination for the American Girl's lighter? (See, I already forgot that chicks name).

One thing this movie did for me was make me realize how far cinema has come, from a technical standpoint. We can now successful recreate scenes of total and utter gruesomeness that they just couldn't effectively do back then. For instance...

The girl I mentioned that refused to let American Girl into the school? Well, they become fast friends after maggots fall from the ceiling. And then what happens to her? She falls into a pit of razor wire. Only it wasn't really razor wire. And it didn't even look close to razor wire. It looked like she fell into a pit of extension cords. I didn't even realize she was being hurt until it panned up closer and she had red markings. Only, they were in areas that hadn't been scratched up. Though I guess it doesn't matter because the rude bitch ended up having her throat sliced by a black-gloved hand. OOoooOOoo, mysterious!

After her death (45 mins into the movie or so) American Girl investigates. And naturally, more trouble ensues. I think the whole moral of this movie is that meddling Americans getting into affairs that aren't really theirs to get into cause trouble to happen. I mean, yes the whole school is run by witches and they want to kill people (I guess), but come on! They wouldn't have killed her if she would have left it all alone. The headmistress/principal/Dumbledore knew her aunt for crying out loud!

Oh yeah. There was this one particularly odd scene where the schools only pianist (blind at that) is walking home in the middle of the night with his all-black German Shepherd seeing-eye dog and he comes to this wide open plaza and suddenly the dog starts barking. The next thing you know the blind guy is shouting for someone to show themselves (not that he could even SEE the person if they did). Well, a large gargoyle/gryphon statue on a building disappears. And then the next thing you know, the dog is mauling his owners throat. I was totally confused. I had no idea WHY THE DOG KILLED HIM! WHY THE BLIND GUY?! I MEAN, WHY WOULD YOU KILL YOUR ONLY FRACKING PIANIST? WHO WILL PLAY THE MUSIC FOR THE FREAKY BALLERINAS TO DANCE TO? Then I realized that, despite being a school for dancing, little to no dancing takes place.

Update: I guess I kind of nodded off or something while watching the movie because, according to Wikipedia, the blind guy quit the school shortly before after his dog was accused of mauling the nephew to the school's headmistress. I guess the dog had a prior.

Okay so, in short, this movie was awesome.

(Oh yeah. I forgot. The girl from the beginning? Who ran out into the storm? She died. She was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, strung up with electrical wire and thrown through a stained glass ceiling. It was intense.)
Oh, another note. There are spoilers in this review. Thank you.

taking my baby's breath (rough draft)

WARNING!

What follows is, for the most part, a story of complete and utter fiction. That is to say, what follows is completely and utterly made-up. Then again, maybe it isn’t entirely. If you are one, like me, who skims headlines and news stories, then perhaps this story might be true. Perhaps this story could be found between the lines of all those grisly articles about all the things that seem to make up the news of our current and everyday lives.

The following is just a story. Any similarity between actual people, places and/or events is most likely coincidental. The events that follow did not happen between the dates of August 3rd and December 16tth. And the year was definitely not 2006. With that out of the way, let me further preface this story with the following:

The lens is out of focus so the only thing that is really visible is a blur of dark colors. Crickets sound in the background and the audience is left feeling disoriented and, perhaps if the director does his job properly, nervous. Suddenly the chirp of crickets is intermixed with the sounds of heavy breathing. Soon that breathing completely overtakes everything and the crickets are forgotten. It’s just the audience, a blurry collage of muted blacks, greens and dark blues and that overly audible breathing.

Then the camera shifts and very slowly a pale form came into focus. The breathing remains loud and thunderous and very much off-screen. The lens gives a slightly sharper detail and the audience can vaguely tell that the form is a naked body. A naked body covered in splatters of blood. It still looks like everything viewed through fogged glass. Then the body moves. The body is being dragged and the audience, because they are smart, can infer that the person making with the heavy breathing is the one dragging it.

The breathing is interrupted every now and again with a few well placed grunts and groans. The dragger is finding this task to be difficult, but completely necessary. Zoom in on the naked body. The lens comes to fully focus.

Her face is cut up and scared forever. Not beyond recognition, because her lovely blue eyes remain open and focused somewhere off in the distance. Somewhere very much off screen. Her lips, supple and moist, are barely parted and uncut. Her nose is broken and it once must have been angelic and near perfect. She is a blonde.

The body stops moving. The audience can hear her legs plop back down onto the tall, wet grass with an audible thud. More off-screen panting. The camera remains focused on the girl’s face. It zooms closer to her eyes. The breathing is replaced again with the sounds of crickets chirping.

And then the screen is just a single blue eye that had once been alive. And then the screen cuts to black and in bold, red letters is replaced with:


THE KILLERS

by Corey Fleming

LISTING

1. Jenny Was A Friend of Mine
2. Mark
3. Mr. Brightside
4. Kyle
5. Smile Like You Mean It
6. Natalie
7. Somebody Told Me
8. Andy
9. All These Things That I’ve Done
10. Kyle II
11. Andy, You’re a Star
12. Jennifer
13. On Top
14. Mark II
15. Believe Me Natalie
16. Natalie II
17. Midnight Show
18. Andy II
19. Everything Will Be Alright
20. Justin
21. Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll
22. Credits

the boardwalk nightmare

She isn’t who she says she is and that is how she manages to marry my father and become my stepmother. In the waking world she is actually the woman who gave birth to me but I am so far removed from that place. She has no name and a menacing shadow constantly obscuring half of her face. And she is a bitch.

The details of my actual mother’s death are never revealed to me and it doesn’t really matter because knowing probably, most likely, would not change what happens. All I know, all I remember is that this woman causes nothing but terror for my sister and me. We live on some costal town, probably somewhere in California because it’s sunny and temperate and wonderful. So probably San Diego.

The details are fuzzy. The four of us (Dad, Stepmom, Sister and I) are walking down a boardwalk, crowded with people and abuzz with noise and activity and excitement. Stepmom (remember, she is my real mom in the real world), is complaining to Dad that Sister and I are terrible children and we need to be sent to some strict, under-regulated, off the charts boarding prison school camp where they “straighten” children out. (Ironic note: they all undoubtedly sodomize their “students”). We are, naturally, vehemently against this option and insist that our stepmother “shut her fucking cracked-out mouth”. I don’t know about the choice of words there, but they were spoken.

This of course launches her into a fury. Flames seem to literally erupt from her hair and eyes and mouth. She screams and bellows and waves her hands in the air. My sister and I run. My Dad does nothing. We run past quaint little shops and bums and beaches. We run up streets with cute houses that are completely different from every other one. The palm trees are suddenly replaced with oaks and elms and spruces and there is grass and the sun is just a little colder. Behind us some yards away the beach and boardwalk remains, but we are now in Michigan.

Oliver Street. And we burst into our grandparents house (the home of our stepmother’s parents) and rush up the carpeted stairs to our grandmother’s room. And she is sitting on the edge of her bed, rubbing her eyes as if she has just woken up. Her face is aged and worn and covered with wrinkles that make her age almost impossible to accurately determine.

We fall to our knees, the two of us exhausted and crying. We beg and plead with our grandmother to protect us from the woman who has somehow tricked our father into marrying him and threatening to send us so far away. She speaks softly and assures us that we are going nowhere.

And then, as if on cue, the raging psycho burst into the room, the flames having died out. She points an accusatory finger at our faces and demands that we return to the boardwalk. The boat is ready and we are to be shipped off. Our grandmother stands and tells her daughter that, just because she failed her as a mother was no reason to take it out on her own children. And at this our stepmother slaps our grandmother and we scream because we know, at that moment, we are going to be loaded onto a boat and taken away to some horrible place and

I wake up. It’s 2-something in the morning. I really need to figure out how to sleep a whole night through.

In other news, I am pretty sure my mom’s conversation with that Cox rep last night is the cause for this dream. I’m almost pretty sure it’s almost impossible for my mom to actually be my stepmom and/or breathe fire. I hope.

i smell murder and drugs and bears.

It’s been a week, maybe, since my last posting. I think, because I never go back and read them, that I was droning on about what to write or where to start or why Dr. Seuss is such a fracking genius. Either way, today as I was carrying on conversations with insurance reps from United Healthcare, I was hit with an idea. While trying to translate the fellow’s broken Indian-English, I realized what it was that I need to write.

It is to be a story of love. A story of good decisions gone wrong. A story of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Of hot summer fun and cold winter nights. Of danger and intrigue. Of shallow and jaded youths with nothing but time and money. A story that will go absolutely no where, but end at a destination all the same. It will feature chapters titled: “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine”; “Midnight Show”; “Everything Will Be Alright”; and many, many more! (actually, like 8 more, but who is counting?)

Working Title: The Killers. See where this is going? I bet you do.

In other news, I had a horrible dream last night. I can’t remember much of it except for being in a locked classroom with a bunch of other random people. I was seated next to Ryan and my co-worker, Mary Beth (this time alive and well) was seated in front of me. I was all panic-stricken and hyperventilating about a serial killer who (for reasons unknown to me) was out to kill me. Like, he would stop at nothing to end my life.

Well, Mary Beth is telling me to calm down and not to worry. After all, we were afforded the protection of a locked, wooden door right? Clearly she had never heard of a little novel (or film) called “The Shining”. Anyhow, the woman who is in charge of the classroom lets us all know that she has a squad of police officers coming to show us what to do in the even we encounter “a dangerous, psychotic escapee mental patient”.

So the cops show up with a tall man. The chief fellow introduces himself and holds up this orange jumpsuit-type thing with two very thin, very long sleeves. He says something like: “All escapee patients will be wearing this. So don’t worry too much because they can’t move a lot with them on. So, you know, you’ll be okay.” Then he calls for a volunteer to help demonstrate his moves. Naturally, since this is my dream, I get called.

So I come to the front of the room and get positioned in front of the guy and, sure enough, when he looks down at me I start screaming: “OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD ITSHIMITSHIM!” And then his hands are on my throat and I can feel it crushing and I’m dying and-

I wake up.

PS: I was streaming KROQ (THE world famous) on my computer this morning and listening to the Kevin and Bean Show. Anyhow, one of the news reports coming out of LA was that like, some 100 people died the other night due to overdosing on Ecstasy. Which brings me to two things:

a) I do not want to die with a pacifier in my mouth
b) I am too freaked out to try that shit because I know if I did I would be one of those 100 people.

One other note. I spoke of my dream to a coworker and she stopped me midway through to tell me that she’s always had this creepy feeling that I will be murdered. She couldn’t explain why.

That’s all.

these things i do are not for you

I’m not sure where to begin. Ideas have never been that big of a problem. I guess for me, right now, my biggest obstacle is my own inability to formulate a proper starting point. I have been told, by more than one person that if starting at the beginning doesn’t work, to start somewhere else. After all, it’s not like I’m chiseling any of this in stone. As a matter of fact, the beautiful thing about computers is how easily information is manipulated. If I don’t like how one thing looks or if another doesn’t quite match up to something else further down the line, I can simply delete it and it’ll be as if it had never been at all.

So, we come back to my main dilemma. I don’t know what idea to focus on. I’ve always been the type of person, for as long as I can remember (which isn’t all that much because my memory sucks), to get bored easily. Or distracted. Or bounce from one thing to the next without the slightest bit of thought or consideration. I’m impulsive and prone to random acts of sheer randomness.

I have ideas floating in the cesspools of my imaginative brain, but I just don’t know which to try and cultivate. Previous attempts to keep my focus on more than one thing usually lead to finishing absolutely nothing. This then results in my writing folder on my hard drive to contain a million little word documents that contain small blurbs that ultimately mean nothing.

I feel I need to start with shorter stories. I feel that writing short stories takes a little more effort than writing full on novels or books. A writer of short stories has to learn control. They have to learn how to hone a plot with laser-like precision from start to finish. They have to be short, but contain near the same emotional impact that a novel might contain. They have to be entertaining and keep the reader engaged. They have to be nearly all that a novel is, but…shorter.

Then again, I have to wonder if the ideas I have could formulate into a full-length novel. I’d hate to be one of those writers who publish some 1,500 page book with 1/3 of it containing actual meat while the rest is just that steroid injected chemical attempting to boost the word count. The longest thing I’ve ever written amounted to exactly 91,470 words and it’s a StarCraft fanfic that I wrote back in high school. And, shocking I know, never finished. I actually skimmed through it not too long ago and, wow, it’s horrible in this “my words are all over the place helter skelter” sort of way.

Where was I? Where am I? And there goes my entire train of thought. I’ve been wading through my music library on iTunes. I find myself very connected to whatever creative mojo I have when a damn fine song is playing. I can’t write while the song is actually on, because I end up typing the lyrics (if there are lyrics. I know, music without lyrics nowadays is something most people can’t seem to grasp. Or if the lyrics are about melting popsicles. Really now. Did a five year old write that song)? It says something too, I think, about song writers who can, through the course of an album and with so few words, capture nearly every spectrum of human emotion and lay out the soul in a way a book or a story never really can.

Which is ultimately what I want to do, at some point. I just want to write something real and honest. I’ve been second guessing myself. I’ve been worried about the kind of response I’d get from people. Would my parents approve of this? Is so-and-so going to be mad that I’ve portrayed this like that? Would people think me a loser for writing such and such?

It’s funny, if I put half the amount of energy I put into debating with myself about how people perceive me, I think I might actually have had finished an entire writing project. Imagine that!

Sometimes I talk to myself, but not because I’m crazy or alone or because I like the sound of my own voice (though, come on, like, who doesn’t LOVE my voice); I talk to myself because sometimes vocalizing puts things into a greater focus than just thinking. And sometimes typing out words and posting them on a whim brings a certain sense of clarity. Even if, come the next morning, I find myself wishing I hadn’t.

There is a passage from “Oh The Places You Will Go” that always struck me as the most poignant. It’s the part where our intrepid traveler of life’s highways comes to The Waiting Place. As a kid the imagery sort of freaked me out because everything was so dark and damp and unpleasant. As a kid I never understood the message being conveyed, but now with adulthood and the various experiences that has, for better or worse, helped shape me into the person I am today and will, through the course of more experiences, shape me into the person I shall be tomorrow and the day after, etcetera, etcetera that passage gets to me.

So much so that, after having posted that passage in one of my various other blogs (now all long forgotten R.I.P.) a friend of mine asked me what I was waiting for. Perhaps because I’m impatient and impulsive and prone to flights of fancy, I was waiting for something to fall into place without really having to do much. I mean, come on, awesome things like that happen in movies and television and books. And then throw in the fact that all that kind of imagery is practically force-fed to us by society and wham! But seriously, Jacob, I still don’t have an answer for you.

So back to the beginning. Where to start? Maybe tonight, after I’ve tossed and turned and flipped my pillow end over end to keep it cool and wrapped myself all mummy-like to keep warm and that illusive beast we like to call “sleep” is just within my reach and I’m just shrugging off everything and slipping away it’ll come.

I mean, after all, if not now, when?

a dream in which mary beth dies.

I don’t know where the beginning starts, so I’ll simply share what I remember.

There is a house, Victorian perhaps, or maybe it isn’t a house at all. We’ll just leave it as a building, constructed of wood and aged to the point where most would consider it derelict and uninhabitable. I can say nothing of the surroundings outside, because from where I remember we were already inside.

The room is expansive and dusty. The floor is rotten, the walls seemingly wet. One wall is comprised of a series of large, angled windows that favor us there with a view to the courtyard. It isn’t noticed at first, but on the ceiling are a hodgepodge collection of wrought iron fences, nailed loosely and hanging precariously.

There are only four people in this room. Myself, Kitty Walker and her mother Nora and Mary Beth Richardson, a co-worker of mine. Kitty and Nora are characters on an ABC television program, Brothers & Sisters, but it doesn’t occur to me that it would be odd for them to be present.

An ominous voice-over states, with a touch of dramatic flair, “and by the end of the night, one of them would be gone forever.” And, almost on cue, the whole room starts to shake. Debris begins to fall. The wrought iron fences swing downward. Mary Beth is impaled. From her chest, four iron spikes protrude like the fangs of some ancient, evil beast. Circles of blood blossom around the spikes and she gasps.

I find myself shouting: “No! It can’t possibly be Mary Beth! She isn’t even on the show!”

Everything transitions seamlessly to another room. It’s a hospital room like any other generic hospital room around the country. White walls. A window. A curtain. A bed. Mary Beth lays there, seemingly asleep. I ask: “Are you awake?”

And her eyes flutter open. She sighs. “I feel like I’ve been asleep for so long,” she says. “I feel so rested.” I smile, thrilled to know that she was able to survive the horrible incident from before.

I turn to the door and call for everyone to come and see Mary Beth. No one comes. I find this odd, because I know they had all just been outside not but a moment before. I turn to face Mary Beth, words forming on my lips, but lost in an instance.

Everything has morphed to various shades of white, black and gray. Mary Beth is on the bed, circles of blood forming where the fence had impaled her. She is ashen and sickly. Her hair is stringy and lifeless.

I run from the room, terrified and in disbelief. As I move down the hallway, I see Diana, another coworker of mine, seated at a computer terminal, typing away. Quickly I reach her and ask:

“Diana! Have you seen Mary Beth? She’s awake!”

At this point, she looks up and gives me a blank stare. “Corey, that’s not funny.” She keeps typing. “Mary Beth died. You know this.”

I return her stare with a dumb one of my own. “But, she just woke up. I saw her in the backroom. She was sleeping.” I turn to look behind me. Mary Beth is standing there, a few feet from the two of us.

“See! She’s right there,” I say, pointing at Mary Beth. Diana looks past me and I can tell that she sees nothing. Her face remains unmoved.

“Maybe you should see someone,” she tells me. “Clearly this has affected you.”

Ellen walks up from behind Diana. “What’s going on here?”

I look to Ellen. “I’ve been trying to tell Diana that Mary Beth is alive, but she keeps telling me she isn’t. Which I don’t understand because she is standing right here behind me. Can’t you see her?”

Ellen raises her brow and I know that she must think I’m crazy. I walk to a row of cupboards to Diana’s left. I point them. I look at Mary Beth.

“Mary Beth, please open one of these cupboards and prove to these two that you are still alive!”

Marty Beth steps forward and grips the hand. She pulls it open. I see the door swing. If she were dead and merely a ghost, it stands to reason that her hand would have simply passed through the material. Here she is, however, pulling open the cupboard.

Diana and Ellen stare, unmoved. I look at them, smiling. I look back to the cupboard. Its closed. “But,” I begin to stammer.

“Corey, I think you should see someone. Mary Beth is dead.”

I look back to them with my mouth hanging open. I look behind me again. Mary Beth is gone.

-END OF DREAM