/yesod

Tag: gasp

  • forearms

    Napping this afternoon on the couch, I dream…

    …we’re sitting at the dining room table, my wife and I.

    I hear someone call “Tom” from the back hallway. I turn to see something there, down at the bottom of the steps — small and pale, almost like a child.

    “Don’t look!” my wife says just as it rushes up towards me…

    …awaken with a gasp, lying on the couch with my arms across on my chest.

    I cannot open my eyes. I cannot breathe. I cannot move.

    Something is holding it’s hands on my forearms, pressing me down.

    My breath hisses out between my bared teeth. Little gasps push out of me. I can hear myself whimpering as I struggle to rise, to open my eyes, to speak the name of my God.

    Panic. I can feel my body shaking with the effort to move, those hands holding me down . . . something over me, drawing the breath out of me in long, hissing strands.

    Finally I manage one word: “Ssssssssasssssstop.”

    Immediately, the pressure on my arms lightens and I sit up and open my eyes.

    Alone in the room.

    Even now, writing this, my shoulders and forearms ache as though I’d been carrying a great weight.

    And I can still hear that hissing whimper in my ears. It sounds a little bit like laughter.

  • the floating eye

    …and I have no breath to scream as my daughter falls twenty feet to the hard concrete floor, a gasp pressing out of my as I run to pick up her tiny, limp body.

    “Oh god, her eyes…”

    I turn away hiding her face from my wife so she cannot see how our daughter’s right eye has become detached and is floating freely between one socket and then other as she tilts her head, a dreamy smile on her face.

    It is horrible to see. It is my fault.

    So horrible that, later that day, I decline to tell my wife the particulars of my dream. I want to spare her the horrors of that image, the drifting float of our child’s eye.

  • mother, father, cat

    Do demons stand still? Can you look for them in corners or out of the way places? Do demons stop long enough for you to see them? Do demons stand near us? Where do they stand?

    In the dream, my house has been transformed into a filthy hole. The kitchen is a mess, bits of food, dirty pots and pans, and crusty dishes piled everywhere.

    My mother sits on the patio and smokes cigarettes.

    My father sits in the living room, studying Talmud.

    I try to clean up the mess.

    My cat walks though my dream, his mind embraced by madness. His mouth gapes, his eyes stare, insane light shining through. His tongue flaps out between his fangs, drooling mucous and vomit. He yowls to wake the dead.

    I call to my mother to put on her glasses. I ask her “Can you see him? Can you see the cat?” She doesn’t answer. And I ask her again, and then I say “Can you see demons..?” And I go into my earlier ideas on demons. I speak and the cat yowls and in the living room my father is a dusty corpse.

    When I woke from this dream I was saying “Do demons stand still?” in a breathless gasp.