“James, I really like your fiction—your engaging and often comic style that is. But your content! Please, can you write a story of love and beauty and searching minds reaching for the stars, with a little sunshine, that does not end in some grunge-fest brawl or involve some poor schlep running for his life from that which he most fears. You really had me with IED Davon and Liza Spaz—and you had to bring Whiteboy Wayne into it! Ugh!”

“Please, no rape, no death, and nobody gets eaten—not even a tiny piece. Throw some warm and fuzzy in there for your female readers.”

-Celine

Began writing at 5:17 a.m. 4/10/15

Lunch break at 8:30 to 8:55

Completed the story at 9:42

Proofing and encoding into the back end of the sight 9:43 to 10:28

4,232 words

Justin had been a lot of things, among them a frustrated actor, a toiling supermarket stock clerk, a fairly successful indie show wrestler. But being a frustrated poet was perhaps the worst. He had this song in his soul wordlessly pining to escape and it was up to him to give it form, function, and most of all, beauty and let it fly like a dove out over a pristine meadow.

Yes, he thought to himself, a venue to find my form, to set my muse free.

As the bus rocked to a stop his serene reverie was rudely interrupted by some ghetto bitch who was dressed up like a respectable slut in leather jacket and suede skirt, and had a collection of poetry and her own marble pad and pen clutched in her arms.

Justin immediately felt guilty for judging this woman by her exclamation of disgust, for her plight was kind of sketchy at the moment. The pretty young black girl—college age—had been prepping for the very same workshop he was headed to at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital where volunteers from Baltimore area campuses had been recruited for a unique sleep study, where they would be aided in recalling their dreams and then paid for recording their impressions in verse, to be published in a prestigious journal. But this young lady’s day was not looking too prestigious at the moment.

Next to this woman—seeming delicate now in her out-of-place finery, lace cuffs, butterfly headband and daisy earrings on this gray overcast April day—sat some indigent elder white trash dude in a worn out coat that should had been discarded in the 1980s, a balding head, and a poorly sculpted full white beard. The fellow had been nodding, reminding one of a heroin addict doing the lean, but had snored also, so was probably just worn down by the years—not worn down enough, apparently to neglect the softest head rest in this rocking sheet metal aquarium of a transient world; the suede-covered lap of the aspiring young poetess!

The man’s face dipped with a wheezing breath into the brushed leather lap below the owner’s tightly clutched books and just snored away, right into her crotch!

The lady was panicking, afraid to touch the grungy old dude—who at least did not smell—and began a rhythmic rising chant, one part despair one part prayer, “Oh My God, Oh My God, Oh Ma Goud—Oh Ma Gawd!” as the old white man’s face languished in her lap.

As Justin tracked with deep empathy the downward spiral of her diction from the academic height she no doubt sought to attain to her dialect of East Baltimore origin—and considered heroically tapping the brute on the shoulder and waking him—her final OMG brought the man to his senses. The fellow shook his head slightly and began sitting back up—a string of drool attached to his overgrown mustache and her suede skirt. The poor girl had had enough. She stood up, rang the bell, and shouted between rising wracking sobs—as if she were having an anxiety attack—“This stop! This stop driver—please!”

And there they left her, her sunny day turned gray, her little shoulders rising and falling with her every anxious breath as the April rain began to break over her in its slow, cool, erosive way.

Justin looked across the aisle into the face of the sleepy mountain man of the inner city, who met the look with sleepy eyes and returned to his rocking nap.

That is so wrong, Justin thought to himself. That young woman was taking this journey of expression and this thoughtless heel drove her out in the rain, and does not even appreciate his negative effect on her young life. He then found himself talking to the old guy, “You know that girl flipped out because you nodded on her lap—she’s out there in the rain with dashed hopes because of your thoughtlessness.”

The man looked at him vacant-eyed and without anger and spoke in a sleepy drawl, “Hopes—this is Baltimore dude. Who has hope in Harm City?”

Oh here we go, he thought.

“Look Sir, she was headed to the Poetry Sleep Study at the hospital, now her and her notes and books and her suede skirt are being ruined in the rain.”

The man’s eyes lit up, but not with guilt or compassion, but rather self-interest. “A sleep study—people have been telling me I need a sleep study.”

“No shit, Sir.”

“How do they do it?”

"The recruiter said we would sit side-by-side-in pairs, in a white walled room and be given an ambient cocktail. It’s really a medical study you see. We are being paid.”

“Paid!” the man interjected.

“Yes, not much, but paid. The purpose behind this study is to help people deal with their dreams, particularly people with sleep disorders. People with an interest or aptitude for poetry—aspiring writers—have been recruited as a control study group. The idea is, when the subjects wake side-by-side they are supposed to look around at the white walls and explain in vivid detail the scenery from their dream life.”

The man then rudely interjected again, “But that won’t work. What if you and me wake up next to each other”—Oh please God, no, no. Why did you have to open your mouth again Justin—“and I have to listen to the backdrop and subtext of your gay twerp do-gooder dream. Won’t that mess up my righteous dreamscape?”

“Look, I don’t know all of the procedures. Maybe they put in earplugs and use flash cards?”

The unnamed man opined, “It would make more sense to use audio baffles that permitted the question to be spoken into your ear.”

“Who are you again, and why should I care?”

The man extended his gnarled hand and drawled, “I am James, and I think I will sign up for this poetic sleep study.”

Justin managed to extradite his hand from the callused paw of the creepy old man and said, “Look, it’s a poetry sleep study and it’s full. Not only do you have to be a poet—which I’m guessing you’re not—but there needs to be a vacancy.”

The man looked back out the window over his shabbily clothed shoulder, nodded and said with smug satisfaction, “Yep, one pretty little vacancy washed clean of the Sins of Ham with Freya’s tears—it’s Friday you know young man, and what is your name?”

“Justin.”

“Glad to make your acquaintance Justin. My lady friend hasn’t been letting me sleep over—says I've got the apnea; sends me out into the rain to catch the bus because she says I snore. Maybe this sleep study fixes that, and helps me with my writing?”

Against all odds, James Langford, former heavy metal guitarist and song writer for the metal band Columbian Necktie, who composed such awesome two-chord tunes as Nord Bang and Mud Blood and a Bud, sat next to Justin as Doctor Holstein and the sleep study people wired them up in their easy chairs. The man’s favorite story of touring on the road was about being tossed into the mosh pit by his savage fans and having a molar knocked loose. He then pulled it out on stage and finished the performance using it as a guitar pick!

As his audio baffles were being adjusted and his ambient cocktail administered intravenously—which had not been the impression he had gotten from the recruiter—Justin thought, My last sight is of this creepy old dude trying to grab the ass of Doctor Holstein.

The unlikely bull dyke of a choice for the man’s lecherous attention seemed un-phased. Then James Langford’s hand was immobilized by sleep study hands and the wrist buckled to the arm of the white leather plastic-covered easy chair.

“What, what, this cannot be! Restraints were not in the contract.”

As two pair of strong hands buckled Justin’s arms to the chair Doctor Holstein smiled down into his face and spoke soothing words. “Not to worry Mister Bemiller, this is for your own protection. We cannot have you extracting your baffles or your I. V. Sweet dreams.”

Justin woke in his easy chair to a room, not of white walls and surgical austerity, but of powder blue brick hung with clinging violet ivory under an azure blue sky. There was no chair occupied by the brute from the bus beside him. Before him, sitting upon an onyx throne with her back to a pearly gate festooned with lush tea green ivy, was Doctor Holstein, resplendent—and not the least bit dykish—in a pink Easter dress just as his little sister had worn on her fourth birthday.

The stainless steel floor that had so disturbed him before had been replaced by lush bluish grass over grown with a riot of daisies and butter cups. Ambling among the flowers was Steevo, from work, the guy that stocked the pet food and cleaner aisles. Steevo—Insane Clown Posse tattoo on his neck and all—was dressed like a gay Manhattan clothing designer as he uncharacteristically picked flowers and put them in chalice.

“This is my dream?” he inquired of the princess-like Doctor Holstein on her onyx throne.

She answered in his mother’s voice, “Radiant with beauty, the cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.”

“What the hell?”

She looked at him with imperious disdain, grand and beautiful, as she rose from her throne of ash-black glass, and tuned with a slight smile and blew a kiss to Steevo, who scampered after her with his chalice full of flowers clutched in his big tattooed hand like a great dwarf child. The queen of this never-never land—of his subconscious secret garden—extended her elegant hand for Steevo to take and he looked mischievously over his shoulder at Justin and said, “Hell yes! You are so lucky Bro,” and ambled out the door—no, it’s a gate—like an ape holding hands with a goddess, his chalice of flowers spilling absently as the gate swung open to admit him into a shimmering cloud of light and welcome comfort.

“This is messed up. Look, it is an exercise.”

He then looked down and saw that he was dressed in elegant robes of purple—the color of kings—and that he was not restrained in any way. Indeed he wore a ceremonial dagger at his hip in a jade encrusted scabbard of silver hung from a chain of blued steel.

“I am in a dream-scape, a drug induced reality. The pearly gate is the key. I must simply walk out through that pearly gate to find my muse—like Orpheus given another chance to rescue his lover from Hades.”

Justin rose from the couch upon which he had apparently reclined like a king, and stepped onto the grassy sword of his tiny dream kingdom. The grass felt plush, warm and loving to the touch. His feet were bare, which leant a sensual luxuriance to his state of repose.

“This is great, beautiful, so warm and fuzzy.”

“I could use more sunlight though. This needs to be a happy day. “

The azure sky above then shone with a bright life-giving radiance, nourishing and warm but not harsh on the eyes. The warm and fuzzy sensation around his feet and ankles was enhanced through contact with the suddenly rejuvenating grass.

“This is the springtime of my dream life! I shall pass through the gate of poets and emerge as the next Theroux, the next Whitman!”

“The Life Bringer leaves!” shouted the millions of tiny voices beneath him.

“What?”

“The light must not leave, the Life Bringer must stay!” Pined countless voices laced with despair as their author’s grew and swayed, and reached out like tendrils of jealous clinging stiflement.

In a panic Justin—“No, the Life Bringer we say!”—ran for the door only to have the growing surging tendrils of grass wind upward around his legs and pull him down face first into the waiting clutches of the reaching, clinging, warm, fuzzy, stifling mass of jealous vegetation which would not let him go.

“No!” clung in his throat, as his mouth was crowded with a surge of grass rushing into him like a torrent of loneliness.

He woke momentarily in a swimming haze, feeling drunk and thirsty all at once. The room was as it had been at the inception of the study, except that a curtain hung between him and James. Also, in place of the Doctor and technicians there was Steevo, mopping the floor like the janitor in some cinema asylum. He looked down to see what Steevo was mopping up, but his head was in a restraint.

“Hey Steevo, what’s up?”

Steevo looked at him with icy eyes over his thatch-like beard and said, like a perky child, “Dude, you guys are so lucky!” and just continued to mop the floor until sleep overtook Justin’s tired mind.

He woke to the breaking of a storm cloud above, then the patter of rain, into which emerged the serene sound of a wood flute blown with more feeling than force. A sandy sounding rattle and then ceramic sounding chimes joined with the soothing song.

He woke naked on an altar, adorned around the wrists and ankles with feathers and beads. Before him sat Doctor Holstein, with long black hair, dressed in a form-fitting buckskin vest and skirt, seated on an anvil-shaped sandstone carved with the face of a coyote.

“Are you drugging me bitch?”

Even as those words escaped his lips he regretted them. Doctor Hostein rose to her feet with one languid motion and reached out her hand to Steevo, who was dressed up like Hiawatha from

that ancient insulting Disney cartoon. Steevo had been plucking mushrooms from among the moss, pine needles and damp earth. He handed a mushroom to the black haired woman who now towered over Justin on his altar of ash-black glass. He crushed the mushroom in her hand, puckered her lips in a kiss, opened her hand, and then blew a cloud of fungi powder that made the world spin.

She turned with one beckoning look to him, and a hand out to Steevo. As Steevo leaped for the hand and accompanied the unlikely Indian woman like a pet ape, Justin saw that they walked through the pattering rain—rain that somehow did not touch him—toward the mouth of a cave, from out of which issued the music of the flute.

As she disappeared within and Steevo followed, his improbably present coworker—who Justin had never ever met in his dreams—looked over his shoulder with a twinkling grin and said, “You are so lucky dude.”

“The cave, the cave is the womb of creation. I will be reborn—I must enter and the sleep study will be over.”

Justin leaped down from the black onyx altar and arranged his feathered headdress just so, determined to enter the cave with grace, even though two rattle snakes curled to either side of its entrance provided the rattle section for the cave’s flute-like breath-song. The rain yet fell, now wetting him and the high mountain ground at his feet. All around the walls of the sleep study room had become coniferous trees packed so close together that they might as well have been a wall.

He cleared his mind of all anxiety and stepped sure-footedly forward—then came the brutish sound of a white man’s voice, “Oh naw ya don’ injun!”

Justin started and looked to his right to see James, his nearly bald head scared from a brutal scalping. He wielded a big bowie knife and snarled as he charged—dressed in animal furs and buckskins—with obvious evil intent. Justin bolted past the altar and noticed that the trees were too close together to squeeze between. As if by instinct he ducked a vicious swipe of the bowie knife and ran back around the altar. Around and around for eternity he seemed to race before the savage pursuit of the old white mountain man who kept snarling, “Goddamned injun can take me scalp, but to hell if ye I’ll git my gold!”

Justin woke in the sterile confines of the sleep study chamber, the curtain pulled double beside him now, the echo of a buzz saw coming from somewhere beyond. His only consolation was Steevo, who was leaning over him, applying a dressing to his head.

“What happened to the top of my head? It hurts. What happened, Steevo?”

Steevo just grinned and said, “You guys are so lucky!” as he turned a knob that was at the base of Justin’s ear—“what the hell!”—and Justin faded off sound to sleep.

He woke in chains, sprawled at the foot of a great black throne upon which sat the Witch Queen, draped in fuligin robes, blacker than blackest night. At her feet sat a great dog with the head of a man; the head of Steevo, his eyes heavy with the pleasure of being scratched behind his massive neck by the knife-long nails of his mistress.

Behind the throne rose the walls of a massive black keep. All around pulsed deep organ and wind music. He was at the head of a defile, closed in by steep crags. He saw now that the throne was not before him, that he looked into the world of mist with his seer’s eye and saw therein the throne room above, where the wicked twisted spire of the keep pierced the clouds. An ominous chanting of “Oooooommm” reverberated from the walls.

“I have to get the throne room to finish the sleep study. I understand what’s going on. This is an identity quest. Lucky for me I’m not some dark-minded screwball, but have a sane head on my shoulders.”

He rose up on his feet and realized that he was only weighted by one great ball and chain and that he wore chainmail under a bright blue surcoat blazoned with his noble crest, the same that was on his shield: a blue song bird holding a daisy against the backdrop of a softly and benevolently shimmering sun. He had no weapon though, and could not drag this ball and chain far.

The granite wall of wind-carved stone to his right burst asunder to frame the figure of a grisly-bearded knight; a short older man missing his shield arm—James, his sleep study partner.

“Oh God I’m dead,” he sighed as the violent old man approached him axe in hand.

“You will be dead My King, if we do not free you and arm you—both in the same stroke.”

The axe came down and freed his foot from the weight of the ball and chain. James then handed him the iron links from which dangled a cannonball, and shouted, “Something to lay about with Sire. We must push across the drawbridge and up into the keep.”

As they strode across the lowered bridge, littered with the corpses of attackers and defenders alike, a great-necked water serpent immerged for the moat. James planted his axe spike into the massive head, only to be flung a hundred paces in the air to smash against the flying buttress of the outer wall. In a battle rage Justin whirled his ball and chain overhead and swung at the monster, which recoiled, causing his ball and chain to whirl around behind him and carry him off the bridge and into the filthy serpent muck below.

He woke to the smell of antiseptics and anesthesia. Feeling ill he looked up into Steevo’s eyes. Steevo was now dressed like a nurse.

His mouth tasted sour when he opened it. “Steevo, buddy what is happening to me?”

Steevo grinned nicely as he adjusted the knob on Justin’s neck beneath the right ear, and said with a sincerely straight face, “You guys are so lucky,” as Justin fell off to sleep wondering if he would wake, but somehow feeling certain that he would.

The sound of ambient thunder tolled in the background as he rose from his black throne of carven onyx. His coat of dragon scales hung to his knees. His feet were sheathed in polar bear fur boots. His shoulders were cloaked in Grendel fur had from the Weather-Geats he had slain in their surging masses. His sword—which had lain across his thighs—was forged of Hel’s own slag and quenched in the blood of a hundred virgins.

He looked northward to the only realm he had not conquered in the Land of The Nords. There he saw the three stone Fates with their faces to the sea, and knew he had fulfilled the quest road. It remained only for him to defeat their champion and question them. In this way he would learn of the secret of life—the very lore of the gods was within his grasp!

He stalked across the barren rocks that rolled slab upon slab across the roof of the world, toward the stone-faced Fates, chanting their hollow windy dirge out to sea. Their song oppressed him with melancholy and he began to doubt his deeds; to reflect on some weakness of the heart that lurked inside of him, as if it were a residual curse from some past life, where he had been the slave rather than the master.

Then, he came.

Of an awkward gate an armored warrior of the Nords lumbered across the barren lava, lonely as the moon and cold as ice. At length they came face-to-face within steel-ringing distance of the stone Fates, towering like upended dragon ships into the gray sky.

The man was old, worn, haggard and lame, missing his right leg from the knee and his left arm from the shoulder. He was armed with an axe, to Justin’s sword. A twinge of honor struck him, and Justin cast aside his shield, standing weapon to weapon against the Nord champion, who said, “Is there any last request King of Geats?”

Then, as if some other answered, his mother’s fondness for birds struck him, and he returned, “Birdsong, I would hear birdsong at the Final Battle.”

“Then you will!” bawled the old champion, and he pointed with his axe spike to a wide-headed man with a thick thatch beard and a round-faced devil painted on his neck. That man—having appeared from nowhere it would seem—dragged by way of massive ropes strapped across his chest a great steel box painted green, dragging and sparking across the cold baked stone. Finally, when the man stood within a spear-cast of the King of Geats and the Nord champion, he heaved open the black wood top of the box and countless big black ravens surged into the sky and began to circle the two of them as they each began to circle and measure the other.

The Nord champion heaved his axe high and cleaved with a yell like the caw of a thousand death birds—and the Final Battle was joined.

Justin woke with a sinking feeling in his stomach, in the poetry sleep study room. It seemed like it had on their arrival and he was keen to inquire as to James’ experience—as the dream sequences—particularly the later ones—seemed to be right up his alley.

What he saw made his stomach flip. James was reclining in his surgical looking easy chair as Steevo tended to the dressings on his leg stumps, for James had no legs. He was also missing both arms at the shoulder—all wounds professionally bandaged. And, worst of all, was what had happened to his head. The top of the old man’s head had been cut open and a bunch of wires attached to a steel dish were sunken into the cerebral mass.

Steevo was now turning what looked like a knob on James’ neck. With that, Justin panicked and put his hand to his neck to check for a similar implant. But he felt nothing, for, as he discovered upon looking down, his legs were both amputated at the knee, and he had no arms at all.

“No!”

Steevo turned from the neck of his other patient, stepped toward Justin, grinned, and said, “Suweet! You guys are so lucky!”