A Quick Note

I'll be doing a proper post about this week tomorrow (to be honest, not a whole lot has changed; Aunt Michelle is still hanging in, and a lot of people have told me they're happy for me for getting accepted to MiskU), but for right now, I just need to get this out.

I didn't have to work today (yay of all yays), so I took the opportunity to go into town and run some errands. Afterward, I went to Aunt Michelle's to hang out for a while. She's such a good conversationalist, even when she's really tired; I think she's where I learned how to turn a phrase as well as I can.

Anyway, after I got home, I decided to take a quick nap, because why not. I slept a lot longer than I planned, and only just woke up a few minutes ago. But I had one hell of a dream in those last few minutes. I need to write it down before it all goes -- it's already slipping.

It started off like those damned false awakenings. I woke up, started going about my day, all with that awful wrong feeling that I've described before, the one so characteristic of my nightmares. But as I go downstairs into the kitchen, suddenly everything gets really quiet. There are no sounds from anywhere in the house, like I'm home alone, completely alone, not even the sounds of the cat jumping around or anything. Sitting at the table is Rose. She smiles at me, and the wrong feeling sort of fades out, replaced by the warm feeling I recognized only vaguely.

"Come on," she says. I sit down at the table, which is considerably shorter than I remember, and look at the board game between us. From what I remember, it seems sort of like a combination of chess and The Game of Life.

"It's your turn," she says.

I reach down toward a piece that looks like a cross between a queen in chess and a little sculpture of a lily (not sure how it did that, but it did), pick it up, and start to move it toward a square labeled "Lovecraft Country," moving from a square labeled "Intrepid Reporter."

"Are you sure about that?" Rose asks, her eyebrow quirked in that way it always did when I was about to do something ill-advised.

"Don't listen," says a voice to my right. I look over and see Violet leaning against the archway into the hall. "This is what you're supposed to do. Don't ask why," she adds quickly, seeing me open my mouth to ask it.

"I don't know about that," Rose is standing at the counter now, leaning against it. "Do you really want to leave your family exposed like that? Nikki, and Milo? What about your dad?"

"The farther away from them you are, the better," Vi says.

"Or you could always give up." I don't see who says that, and don't recognize the voice -- nor do I hear it again in the dream; it just vanishes -- but I know that I heard it.

Bewildered at how Rose suddenly moved, I look around to see someone different sitting across from me. A man with black hair and a scar across his neck. It's Zeke -- or what I envision Zeke to look like, I guess.

"Don't hesitate," he growls at me. "Make your move."

I glance at Vi, who nods, then take the piece in my hand again and turn my head back just in time to feel a tight hand grab my wrist. I look up, and where Zeke was sitting, Mary-Ann Compton is now standing, leaning over the table, clutching my wrist, her mouth open in the same expression that I'll never forget, that screaming, but there isn't a scream coming from her, just a strange noise between a rattling inhaled breath and static and that whining noise that televisions make when you first turn them on. I blink and she morphs, like in my false awakenings, and she becomes tall and unnatural and that godawful wrong feeling invades as his hand wraps around my wrist again and again and again and it burns my skin and my flesh down to my bone and my rosary, I can't find my rosary, it's not around my neck and I scream for god, for Vi, for Zeke, for anyone to save me --

Just above my screaming, I can hear Violet and Rose chanting one of those rhymes we used to sing while we jumped rope as little girls: Hey there Mary, what's the story?; save my ass from Purgatory -- one, two, three, four...

I woke up in a cold sweat with my jaw clenched and my body bent, the rhyme repeating itself in my head.

I don't know why this nightmare is so much different than the rest that I feel the need to post it here. It just felt different. It was so real -- the pain was so fucking real. I'm hypersensitive to touch anyway; my poor hypochondriac mother is already convinced that I have some rare nerve disorder. I was smoking before I went to sleep; maybe my hand hit some ashes, and my dream compensated for it. I don't know. But after all, it was just a dream.

It was just a dream.