The Last Dream I Remember

It’s one in the morning and I am standing in the bathroom on the second floor. The house is dark and quiet. And I am preparing to smoke the last cigarette of the night. As I pull up the blinds and press my face into the gloom, I see everything has changed. Outside, a heavy fog has drifted from the mountains and settled upon the city. The neighborhood is dank. The treetops murky. The sidewalks irreclaimable. All that was once clear is now ambiguous and opaque. All except the streetlamps, that is. The street lamps are impervious. Their bulbs recast the fog into pale and eerie shapes, and I am captivated by their intensity. They are ghosts frozen in bedclothes, and I can not break my gaze of them.

There is one, looming on the corner, which grabs me in particular. A towering apparition, it is a perfect likeness of the Virgin Mary. She is an incandescent giant, a colossal interloper, with mouths in place of eyes. And she is patient. Above all, she is patient. All night she will wait with outsretched arms for unwitting travelers to traipse into her midst. And when they do, she will descend upon them—rapacious in her haste. She will eat their skin, their hands, their eyes. But not their minds. Never their minds. Those she will leave to darkness. Those she will leave to wander in the brume.

Well not me! I will not be taken! I will never leave this house! I will never leave this room!

And then…and then all is quiet. All unmoving. All except my heart, my eyes, my breath. All three drift beneath the glass. All three flee in measured plumes.