This is mainly for Krista. She likes hearing about and sharing dreams.
I spent yesterday slacking off watching the first season of The Walking Dead, so of course my dreams were going to be trippy.
At 4am I woke up and decided I'd had enough of terrifying zombie dreams, so I deliriously opened the scriptures on my tablet. I meant to go to the New Testament, but somehow ended up in the Pearl of Great Price, and this scripture floated around my dream memory for the next couple hours of sleep. And also zombies.
10 And it came to pass that it was for the space
of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto
man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing,
which thing I have never supposed.
Part 1
I woke up, not quite sure where I was. That feeling that you don’t remember going to
bed here. Yet, upon reflection, this IS
my bed, it’s only logical that I went to sleep here.
James was next to me.
I needed to find the boat.
We need the boat.
Walking outside, I’m happy it’s light outside. The heat of the sun sinks to my core, helping
to dispel some of the chill. It is late
fall, and the frost has settled everywhere.
I was looking for something.
The boat. It will be
down by the river.
James walks with me to the river. We’re almost ready, soon we’ll escape.
Hand in hand we pick our way along the frosty muddy riverbank. I’m looking for something.
The boat. No. Wait.
Something else. We
need the boat.
No. Right there, just
outside conscious thought… I’m looking for something else…
The boat isn’t where it’s supposed to be.
James is very upset. Somehow I
know we’ll get to it, it’s just a little further…
I urge James further. I lie. It probably just got unhooked and floated a
little downstream. I push a branch away
from my face. I know it’s a lie, but I
need to keep looking. What am I looking
for?
I stumble and my foot slips, cracking the ice, sliding into the frigid water. James catches me before anything else gets
soaked. He tries to convince me that we
need to go back now, it’s getting to be about noon, but I just keep going
forward.
My eyes scan the water. Something.
Something. What am I looking for?
James asks me a question. I don’t
know. I don’t know what I’m looking for.
He stops me. “Where
is your ring?” I don’t understand. What ring?
“Your engagement ring.” Looking
down I suddenly realize I’m not wearing my ring.
Have I been here before?
Where is my ring? I
never take it off. How could it be
gone? I stare at my hand in disbelief,
trying to remember the last time I distinctly remember it being on my finger.
I look at James… I can’t remember. Where is it? When did I take it off? This feels important. Why can’t I remember? I don’t lose things. I really don’t forget very often either…
especially something as important as my ring.
It’s been on my finger for 7 years.
Where did it go?
Continuing to walk forward, I think.
I remember yesterday.
I think. It was warmer. I went on a boat ride by myself. Wait.
By myself? That doesn’t seem
right… we’re supposed to stick together… why would I go off by myself?
Where is the boat?
Inside I scream. Why can’t I
remember? I’ve never done drugs, but
movies have portrayed this feeling. This
realization that you lost time, you don’t know how long you lost, or what
you did. Did I get drugged?
James stops me and points something out. What?
He is pointing a corpse.
Strange. There are so many
corpses everywhere now, we mostly ignore them.
But he’s right, there is something strange about this one.
The river is calmer and wider here, and so clear. At what seems the deepest point, there is a
corpse of a brunette girl. Face down in
the muddy lake bed, her brown hair swirls lazily with the undercurrents. Half buried in sediment, wearing jeans and a
tee. She has probably been down there a
while. Lucky her.
Up here the dead get torn apart and eaten.
Maybe that’s what’s strange.
She’s intact, we haven’t seen an intact corpse in a while. Wait.
Don’t corpses usually float in the water?
James observes that she isn’t bloated like most corpses, more like
shriveled. The extremely cold water of the river
must have kept her gut bacteria from reproducing and bloating her.
Still, she entrances us.
I want to pull her up. Examine
her more closely, but there is really no way to do so. It is much too cold to expose a person to
those waters. She is also far too deep
for any clumsy attempts at knocking her loose with a rod.
A little further on we spot our canoe turned over on the far bank. Definitely looking worse for wear. Neither of us understand how it could have
gotten so trashed in the short distance it had drifted downstream.
The days are shorter now.
Realizing how late it already is, we start back,
boatless. No way to cross the river
today, we’ll have to work that out tomorrow.
The quickly gathering dusk gives us new speed, and we no
longer follow the river. Cutting through
the sparse woods, we attempt to shorten our journey home.
To be continued... (no promises)
