Dream A Little A Dream Of Me

“Hey, come’re,” he said as he took her hand.

“Why, what? What are you doing?” She pulled back slightly, confused.

“Just go with, baby,” he reached again and held out his upturned palm, this time waiting for her to offer her hand back.

She sighed a smile and dropped her hand in his as if it were a rock into the mud. He was in a mood and she could tell by the smile on his face. It was a mischievous smile, but the mischief was harmless. He wanted to play with her, but she found he always picked the oddest times.

He started humming and pulled her toward him. His right hand clasping her left with his left hand settled on her hip. She recognized the tune vibrating from his lips but she couldn’t quite place it. It was familiar. It was old. It was the perfect amount of peculiarity she’s become used to with him.

“Stars shining bright above you/Night breezes seem to whisper “I love you”/Birds singing in the sycamore trees/…“

“Dream a little dream of me,” she finished the words for him in her sing-song-y voice.

She pulled her left hand from his and, along with her right, extended them behind his head and dangled them loosely on his shoulders. Both of his hands were now clasping her waist and they swayed together slowly in a softly broken silence with his humming and her angelic voice.

The room was dark and it was late, neither of them were really sure what the exact time was but the streetlights were humming and the neighbor’s living room’s were all dark. The two of them had gotten lost in each other for most of the evening and just decided to move the festivities to the bedroom when he had a moment of inspiration and took her hand. They now swayed in the moonlight that shone in through the window and reflected off of the dining room table, which gave the room a spotlight glow. Their bodies moved just outside the glow but with enough reflection where he could see her lips moving as she continued to sing.

“Say nightie-night and kiss me,” her voice punctuated the last two words and she bit her lip while looking to him. He followed suit with a press of his lips to hers. It was a simple kiss that held them together with the softest touch, but evolved quickly into his tongue penetrating her mouth and lapping at hers while his hands gripped her tight and her arms bent around his neck.

When the kiss finally broke, she continued, “just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me, while I’m all alone and blue as can be, dream-a little dream-of me.”

Her voice stopped for a moment at each mention of the word dream. She looked at him and into his eyes and the light bounced around in them as he smiled. She squeezed herself around his neck and brought her lips back to his and he indulged in another kiss before pulling back and stared back into hers and the smiling beaming back at him.

He sang back to her, “sweet dreams till sunbeams find you. Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you. But in your dreams, whatever they be, won’t you dream a little dream of we.”

She bit her lip and pressed herself into him as hard as humanly possible at his changing of the last verse. She shook her head and dipped her eyes from his, “come on. Let’s go or we’ll wake the sun.”

He twirled her once and she led him to the bedroom, their fingers clasped in a hook the entire way down the hall. The door closed to soft squeals and low growls that filled their sheets until they fell into their own dreams, lingering in them until dawn.

Hey

I’m in bed with you.

Again. Because we always end up in bed.

It doesn’t matter if we argue or feign indifference, we always find our way out of our clothes and against each other’s skin.

I’m going to drift off to sleep in a few minutes but I wanted to capture this moment. You’re asleep, freshly fucked until my legs burned with quit but I refused. I never tap out first.

I wanted to save this moment in my mind at how beautiful you are and what I would give to be lying next to you, just like this in 30 years thinking these same thoughts. Hips worse for wear. Legs would be burned out long before I’d want them to, but you still there next to me to watch sleep afterwards.

So goodnight, gorgeous. I hope your legs are as sore as mine will be in the morning, and I hope you never leave my bed.

“Do you want to get some coffee?”

“I’m not really into coffee.”

I know that wasn’t the point of you asking, to go out for coffee, but I always felt the need to say it.  I didn’t like coffee.  It was almost a badge of honor in some cases.  Everyone around me gulping it down like fuel at the gas station.  Sloshing the troughs of cream and milk as stir sticks lay wasted on the counter.  Not me.  I’m good.

I’ve always had a natural state of alertness and didn’t feel the need for a morning pick me up.  Of course it comes and goes, and of course I could probably use some kind of pick me up, but I always felt that if I succumbed to the coffee bean devils then I’d become reliant on them.  I’d be a walking Starbucks zombie.

You were staring at me with a perplexed look on your face.  Shit, I did it again.

“Well I mean, like, I don’t really like coffee, but of course we can do something else.  If you want.  If you want coffee we can go get coffee, or like I don’t know, something.  I mean, I could get something.  I’m sure-, well like they have other stuff.  Did you want coffee?  We can do whatever.  It’s-, I’m-, like whatever you want.”

There, that ought to fix it.  Jesus.

She raised her eyebrow at me and stared for a decade or two.  Her lips were together and still.  She had the biggest, rounded eyes I had ever seen.  I believe people often described them as saucers, big and bright and a perfect circle.  While I’m staring back into her stare all I can think of is the moon and if it had a twin that lived alongside it.  Two giant celestial circles floating in the sky staring at me through a blanket of night black hair.

“You can get whatever you want.  You don’t need to get coffee.  It was just a front to talk.  Geez, calm down,” she hardened her stare enough that it was obviously in jest.

“Calm down?  I’ll definitely pass on the coffee then,” I smiled in response.

“Yeah, because you don’t drink it right?  You’re not really into it.  I heard that somewhere,” she said while turning to walk away.

“I can stand it in the right company.”

I followed the moon for coffee as it faded below the horizon.

Better than being alone

“This strand of hair,” he slides his finger and thumb back and forth as the other piece of her hair fall away until there’s a single one left in his grip, “this one right here.  I love this strand of hair as much as I love every other strand of hair on your head.  Just as much as I love every freckle on your body and every angle of your curves.”

They were uncomfortably close, she thought.  Their foreheads only a whisper apart.  She could feel his breath along her neck and shoulder.  His eyes were too intense and she couldn’t take it, so she laughed it off nervously.

“You’re just-, no.  I’m-, um, thank you,” she shook her head trying to free her single strand from his pincer grip but he wouldn’t let go.

“It’s true.  All of it.  There are so many things about you that make me hunger to touch you.  To kiss you.  I can’t stop myself sometimes.”

His words weren’t helping her nervousness.  He always says them and they’re very nice things to say, but she can’t help but feel as if they’re just words with no meaning.  She doesn’t understand how anyone could say those things about her.  She’s nobody.  She’s nothing special.  All she wants to do is hide and he’s holding her up telling everyone to look.  It’s as if he doesn’t know her and makes the words he says feel painful and awkward.

She tilted her head away and pull the strand of hair from him, “I have to go.”

He grabbed her hand and held her, “you don’t seem as if you believe me.  After all this time and all the times I’ve professed my love for you.  The times we’ve made love and the times we’ve kissed.  The laughs we’ve shared and intimate moments, you still doubt that I love every inch of you?”

She sighed, “just don’t.  I-, of course, yes.  I do.”

He shook his head, “I don’t believe you.”

“Well what do you want me to say?”  He pushed her too far and the dam broke and the waters came flooding out.
“That I don’t think you’re sincere.  You say the words that you love me but you never seem to understand anything about me.  That when I laugh I do it out of nervous energy.  That when we fucked it’s because your hands wouldn’t stop.  When we kissed it was your mouth forced down my throat.  You’ve never known me, you’ve only ever known what you wanted and took it.  You never stopped to read my reaction to any of it.  You may say you love every inch of me, but only when you want something that I can give you at that moment whether I want it or not.”

He stared at her blankly and spoke without emotion, “so why are you with me then?”

“Because I don’t want to be alone.  I don’t want to be sad and think I’ll never find anyone so I would rather take someone who seems insincere but is nice about it.  I’d rather have a relationship I’m disappointed in than none at all.  And that might seem fucked up to you but, again, you don’t know anything about me so I’m not surprised you don’t realize that I would want that.”

There is no sleep that is peaceful

The sirens are blaring.  They cut through the night and hit as if you were their only target.  It would be painful if it wasn’t terrifying.  The sound ripping through the air.  Jolting you from sleep as it gets louder.  Louder.  LOUDER.  Then fading off only to come back to torture you again.

Sometimes it stops.  When the threat is gone and people can go back to their normal lives as if they hadn’t been shaken to their knees.
Sometimes its only a warning.  A drill.  A cruel joke being played on everyone to ensure they know what to do when their lives are in real danger.  The drills are only ever set during the day though, in the light hours.  If the siren goes off when the sky is dark the scramble to survive sets in.

The sirens are sounding, still.  You can hear the commotion in the streets.  The screaming and yelling.

“Move!  Now!”

“Go!  We have to go!”

“Leave it!  Shoes, clothes, bags on your back and move!”

Children screaming.  Crying for a fear that they don’t know.  Parents heart’s racing for one they know too well.

The sirens continue without pause.  A streak of light screams through the air and everything stops.  Everything moves in slow motion as the flaming ball of light disappears behind the hills.  It’s followed by a rumble.  The ground is shaking.  The hills are on fire and the night sky is melting.

The sirens keep blaring.  This is not a drill.  They are coming.

Excerpt from nothing: Mayhem

“You were the burning mountains.  You were the dried seas.  You were everything I never wanted to witness in my life.  You are destruction,” Kilth pointed at her and spit the poisonous words.

His stare could melt steel, yet she was made of wind.

“I am nothing.  I didn’t burn the mountains.  I didn’t dry the sea.  It was not the destruction you witnessed.  It was the birth of mayhem,” Viol spoke to Kilth in a calm and pleading voice, trying to make him understand her balance.

“The mountains did not burn, they were saved.  A wall of fire to distract from impurity.  The seas did not dry, they were emptied so they could fill again without dilution.  Our world could not continue as it was, so I will start it over.”

“You will end everything!  There will be nothing to start over.  It will all be gone.  Me, you, everyone!”

“We had our chance and we failed.  If life is going to continue, we cannot be a part of it, they cannot be a part of it.  I’m sorry, I tried.  I couldn’t anymore.”

Viol’s body heated and the layers around her disintegrated until she became a white flame.  She hovered in the air and her form flicked sparks to the ground below.  Kilth could only watch and yell, begging for her to stop.  If his pleas reached her, she did not heed them.

She pulled her arms and legs in until she was a ball.  The intensity of her flame increased and the space around her began to glow in a deep blue.  The last words in the world that were spoken were from Kilth, in a whisper to Viol, “I’m sorry too.”

*****

When the world stops being everything created stops as well, the physical and immaterial.  Nothing matters anymore as there isn’t anything to impact upon it.  Time, essentially, stops if there is nobody there to track it.

Viol’s collapse stopped time.  Silence became the only sound after her shriek.  When she flung her arms and legs to let loose her cataclysm everything else ended with her.  The mountains and the sea.  The sky and the grass.  It was blinked away in a flash of white light.  She didn’t know her power.  She didn’t realize that not only would her flame destroy all life on her planet, but it would destroy all possibility of life.

Or maybe she did know that.  She sacrificed herself and every other person on her planet, it included, to start over.  Not just the Gaia but everything, and from everything Viol decided it would begin again with her at the center.  Her flame burst into space and became the beginnings of a new star which would create a new solar system around her.  She would destroy everything to reset the clock with her essence flowing through each particle that makes each new world.

 

Other People’s Smiles

“Do you ever notice people smiling?”  She didn’t turn to him to get his attention, but threw the words out into the void wondering if they would be picked up and answered.

“I guess.  Sure.  What do you mean?”  He didn’t turn either, casually answering her strange question.

“Like, do you ever notice other people.  Do you see them smiling while you drive by them or as they pass by you on the street?  Do you ever get jealous of them?  What do they have to be smiling about that I don’t.  What am I missing?”

“No, not really.”

“Oh.  Maybe it’s just me then?”

“I don’t know.  I’m sure there are others.  It’s kind of naïve to think you’re the only one in the world who does something, or anything for that matter.”

She didn’t answer right away.  She paused and thought over his answer.

“Why do you think you don’t get jealous when you see someone smiling?  It feels so natural to me, wondering what it is that causes their face to shine like that.”

“Why don’t I get jealous when I see other people smiling?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I have you.”

 

Exceprt From Nothing: Dancing With The Devil

When you dance with the devil you reach a reckoning point.  The devil will ask if you would like to dance all night.  The room had spun on your feet.  The music rang in your ears.  Everything was so sweet.  It’s difficult to say no.

So, when the devil asks you if you’d like to keep his steps and company you have a simple choice.

Yes, or no.

Continue dancing with the devil and enjoying the moment as long as it lasts or stop and go back to experiencing it all as everyone else does.

Just know if you say yes the devil owns your dances, all of them, until they are all spent.
If you say no your dances are yours to give out as you please.  They will end some day, no matter what.  Just decide how you’d like to spend them and what side of the room you’d like to sit when they’re all gone.

Excerpt From Nothing: A Little Bit Of Nothing

Mud splattered all along her ankles and shins.  Her dress peppered with the dried muck as well as she stands there with her shoulders slumped and her neck looking like it can barely hold the weight of her head due to the entirety of her exhaustion.  She smile on her face is still bright.  Brighter than the sun even as she looks down the hill.  The walk was long and crossed patches of mud that could swallow a herd of cows.  The sun beat down like a desert but she continued to smile in the fresh air and the outdoors.  Her exhaustion was sought and she found it and hugged it with all of her might.  To finish off her day she collapsed in the cutest fashion imaginable.  She just dropped under a tree.  Splayed out like a chalk sketch of a murder victim that her adventure claimed.  The shade covering her sun and heat doused body and the sweat started to cool in the breeze.  But the smile remained.  The smile wouldn’t fade.  It was tattooed on her face and wasn’t going to drop simply because her adventure was over.