/yesod

Tag: mother

  • the right to bear arms

    …I’m stunned to see the President of the United States at the door. He bustles in before I can get my head around his sudden appearance.

    He is alone and clearly in peril. He slams the door and locks it behind him, thanking me for letting him in. It is strange to see him scared, completely alone. I wonder where his Secret Service protection has gone.

    He apologizes for the intrusion and removes his tattered coat. I notice he has a shoulder holster beneath.

    My mother comes into the front hallway and is clearly displeased to see him in her home. She informs us that his interruption is right in the middle of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and that she doesn’t “feel comfortable with that man having a loaded gun in the house.”

    Her glare is withering.

    I protest, saying it’s our duty to give him shelter and protection. But it’s clear that she’s unimpressed, perhaps because she didn’t vote for him. She returns to her program, leaving me to apologize to the President…

  • brief reunion

    …we sit together in the small living room, balancing plates on our knees and doing our best to keep up the conversation despite the fact that there are some genuinely difficult conflicts unresolved between a few of us. And the fact that some of us are dead.

    It’s a surprise to see them, my grandparents. Odder still is the appearance of multiple versions of my grandfather — he sits with my grandmother, each of them in their late fifties, full of good humor and health . . . and he sits next to me in his early nineties, broken and cadaverous, his eyes pits of sorrow.

    My mother is there . . . but there is something odd about her. I can’t quite tell what it is and I don’t understand why no one else seems to notice or care…

    …and when I wake, I wonder what it means . . . wonder if a call will come today with bad news.

  • the fuzzy pink octopus spider monster

    This is the first dream I can remember — obviously, it’s not the first dream I ever had. That’s long gone now. But this is the earliest one I can remember…

    …we’re driving in the car, my two brothers and me. Out mother is behind the wheel. We’re on our way to the grocery store. My older brother Scott sits up front, talking to our mom. My brother Jim and I are in the back seat, holding our pet rabbits. They are white, a perpetual look of panic in their pink little eyes.

    I realize somehow that something is not quite right with the rabbits. I see a vision within the dream, a flashback of our side yard where the hutch is kept. I see a wispy apparition flowing through the air towards them. It is pale pink, long snakelike arms or tentacles trailing through the air, reaching out blindly to tap along the fence like a blind man seeking out an open path. It is covered in stringy hair, pale pink and white, a gaping black hole of mouth and wild, insane red eyes.

    Hate pours off of it, clouding the air with ribbons of red, like a drop of blood in water. The monster finds the hutch, bends back the cheap plywood lid, and drifts inside. The rabbits explode in a frenzy of stamps and squeals, then go silent.

    Somehow this spider, this octopus, this monster has split itself into two. It shifts form, taking the place of the two rabbits — are they dead? did it eat them? — it becomes them, impersonates them . . . only recognizable by its hateful red eyes staring out from the two imposters.

    These same eyes looking up at me in the backseat of our family station wagon, the lengthening ears becoming long snaking tendrils filling the car, reaching out in the golden afternoon light to wrap around my mother”s throat, my brother’ arms, our faces, muffling our screams…

    I don’t have an exact date for this one, but we had the rabbits when we lived at the house on Peppertree in Dublin, California. Which puts it sometime in the mid 1970’s.

    I was probably six or seven years old. And the horror of those tentacles waving in the car haunted me for weeks. I still feel a pang of it even now.

    As silly as it sounds, a shapeshifting fuzzy octopus spider monster is really pretty terrifying. Especially at that age.

    Years later, I saw it again: There’s scene in the movie Poltergeist where a malevolent spider-like creature prevents the mother from rescuing her children…

    20130106-112241.jpg

    That’s about right. Dye it pink and you’ve got the creature from my dream, more or less.

    (I’ll ignore the question as to why something from my dream in the mid 70’s would show up in an 80’s movie. Sometimes it’s better not to know. We’ll chalk it up to coincidence.)

  • again

    The voices again tonight.

    No music this time, no men.

    One or two women, I can’t quite be sure. Possibly a child.

    I told my wife about the voices a few days ago. She could tell tonight that I was hearing them again. And, of course, she cannot.

    We keep a fan going at night, even in cold weather. White noise.

    She suggested I turn it off, just to see if that helped.

    She might be right. I honestly can’t say for sure.

    Maybe it’s a trick of the sound in the room, the combination of the fan and the hiss of the baby monitor.

    With the fan off, we sat there in the dark and waited.

    There. Not as loud, not as much. But there.

    And again.

    “I don’t hear anything,” she told me.

    I apologized, turned the fan back on so she could sleep and came downstairs to wait it out.

    Down here it’s the usual creaks and hums of the house by night. The fridge ticks over from time to time. The radiators gurgle. The cats snore, dozing. The baby monitor sounds a bit like running water.

    And, sometimes, I think I catch a brief murmur underneath it all. Somewhere.

    I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s all just paradoelia.

    But . . . I have a vague memory of something similar when I was a child. This would have been when I was maybe six or seven years old.

    I remember my two older brothers got to stay up later than me, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair they got to watch Hawaii 5.0 and I didn’t.

    I remember lying there in bed, listening to the pulse of drums and what sounded like singing or chanting –faint and very far away.

    I got up to complain that the TV was too loud.

    My mother told me that the set was off. It was later than i realized, my brothers had gone to bed, She asked me what I heard. When I told her, she gave my father an odd look.

    I would get to know that gesture very well in the coming years — the sidelong glance, lips compressed, a knot of worry in between her eyes.

  • air

    As a child, very young, I was rushed to the hospital with the croup.

    As my mother tells it, I was sick and she went in to check on me when I was taking a nap . . . and I was gray.

    That was Christmas Eve 1970. I was 18 months old.

    I remember it.

    I remember being in the hospital on Christmas, opening my presents there.

    Even now, from time to time, I still dream of choking. I dream that I have no breath to draw, dream my lungs are being crushed under some unseen hand . . . dream I’ve no air to speak the words in my mouth . . . dream I am gasping for breath…

    Even now, I sometimes wake with a hard knot deep in the back of my throat that lingers for hours.

  • 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.