This morning, I woke up with my chest heaving, and my eyes tearing from a dream I had. I enter into these strange phases where I'll have these terribly violent dreams, and somehow remember them. (Seriously when I have the normal, exciting or happy ones, they're always forgotten...no fair!)
Please do read with caution, it's very dark, and very sad. But this reminds me why I love writing, and makes me feel like I'm writing a novel, or a dark fiction. No worries people, I'm not usually this dark. :)
It started out like any ordinary day. My father and I stood
on the flat black rooftop of our house by the beach. We talked about big plans
we had to change it into a mansion luxury home. We spoke of all the rooms we’d
have, the colors, the things we would rebuild, reconstruct, and reinvent. As we
talked, neither of us sat. We had such big dreams for this place. With its
blacktop roof, it’s dark empty interior, and its bare walls. We hadn’t been
there for very long. It was newly renovated, and strangely lonely inside, but
these were all conjecture. In my mind, I didn’t see the interior for very
long—maybe only a few seconds at most.
Back to the rooftop: As we stood pacing back and forth, and
watching the milling people along the beach below us, we spoke of many things.
None of them I can recall now, but they were deep, meaningful, and beautiful
things, I assume about the people in our lives, the hopes and dreams we had,
the successes we were hoping to achieve.
Yes, this was an ordinary day.
But this ordinary day was about to take a sick twist for the
worst. The roof we were walking on suddenly transformed into a platform much
lower in height to the ground, and onto our beach house came a strange, and
rather dirty looking ruffian. He seemed to have a deep rumble every time he
spoke, and his hair was a torrid mess. There were flies nestled here and there,
and you could never fully see his face, for half of it was covered with his
long, dirty bangs. He wore dirty brown jeans, and strangely enough, a long
sandy colored trench coat. It was certainly a frightening sight to behold. He
mumbled a few things, asking if he could buy our house. My father calmly told
him that he could not, and tried to send him on his way. Patient as he was, my
father did not seem to show any signs of discomfort at the sight of this man
who had so rudely intruded on our conversation. The dirty man persisted,
walking in and out of range of our outstretched arms, trying to pull him
towards our front porch steps. (Yes our roof had now become a concrete porch,
with steps leading right onto the beach).
I on the other hand, began to feel both fear, and a bit of
disgust. As I tried to ward him away from the house, he suddenly and quickly
jumped into a random frenzy, finally revealing his eyes as his bangs went
flying back to reveal and even dirtier forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, and
he looked not only insane but also deadly. Within a span of a few seconds, he
leaped down from what had now turned BACK into our roof, onto our second floor.
Now that we had entered the interior, we were delightfully surprised to find
that it had been fully furnished, and there were hundreds of people in there. I
recognized faces from my church in Syracuse mainly, and also my best friend
Esther.
Into this busy room, our assailant flew, swinging his arms
around, running from guest to guest like a madman. All of a sudden, out flew a
small switchblade. As I ran to stop him, he swung the switchblade round and
round, sending hoards of guests flying in the opposite direction. He took the
position of a crouch, and leapt onto a piano, like a frog. From there, he began
to leap onto our guests, toppling them like a house of sticks.
My face turned red, and my anger took hold of me when he
leaped onto the chest of a small boy I knew in college by the name of Dan Kim.
I remember trying to yell out, “NO, NOT DAN KIM”, but the words would not come.
They stayed stuck in my throat, slowly choking me. As I watched helplessly far
away, the dirty man lifted his arm back, and plunged it deep into Dan Kim’s
chest. I screamed. Or at least in my head I did. He jumped onto a few others and quickly and
deftly plunged the knife into more and more innocent bodies. The body count was
piling up.
My eyes turned red and I couldn’t see straight for a moment.
Somewhere in that room, my dad watched, as I suddenly turned from frantic, to
screamingly neurotic, to bitterfly and awfully angry. As he continued to pick
off his victims, I picked up a long pipe, and made to chase after him. He
became acutely aware of me all of a sudden, and made a sprint for the door. I
ran out of the house after him, screaming, screaming, and screaming. “WHY DID
YOU HAVE TO KILL DAN KIM?” All I remember feeling in the moment, was my anger,
and the overwhelming heave of my chest welling up deep sobs for my dearly
departed friend. It felt like a brick house was weighing heavily on my chest,
and I couldn’t breathe. I ran and ran after the convict, all the while praying
in my head for vengeance, and for God to help me run faster, so I could catch
up with the bastard who had stolen years off of the lives of my friends.
I remember yelling after him, “YOU BASTARD!” over and over.
Strangely enough, I never curse in real life, but I was pissed, upset, and
overwhelmed by my fury. All I could think of was how I was going to beat the
culprit to a bloody pulp when I got to him.
Somehow God gave strength to my legs and I suddenly began to
run faster and faster. The scenery around me changed suddenly from the beach to
an empty white tiled temple that resembled closely, the Athenian temples in
Greece. There were white pillars arranged in a giant square formation, and the
entire court was strangely empty except for a small corner of the room, where I
saw other fellow vigilantes already beating the man senseless with other pipes,
and crowbars they had picked up on the way.
As I neared the body, I saw that the man, suddenly and
oddly, transformed into a woman. First, her body changed shape, slowly at
first. Then her hair grew long, and beautifully blonde. For a split second, she
had the face and hair of a girl I went to middle school with—Becky Heise. As I
neared, I saw a look of fear, and desperation in her eyes. She looked up at me
with the face of a martyr, the face of repentance, as her body thudded with the
sound of the pipes flying at her. I winced as I heard her ribcage crack, and
watched her face quickly bruise and split.
As I began to life my pipe to join the others, a small voice
stopped me—“You do not have the right to decide her just punishment. She does
not deserve to die—not at your hand”. My
hand stopped mid-air for a second, but then I brought the pipe down swinging. I
watched as she flinched, but accepted my punishment. But I did not hit her.
Instead, I stopped just short of her neck, and crouched down at eye level with
her. The others had stopped to watch the extraordinary change of events. As I
grabbed a fistful of her hair, partially to hold her up, and partially in my
anger, I spoke through my teeth, seething with and overabundance of the pain,
and the sorrow that I felt. “You do not deserve to live for the lives you have
taken. You had no RIGHT to take the lives that you did, and you do not even
deserve this mercy that I am giving you.” I thrust her head back as I released
her hair.
As I sat down exhausted after all the running, the emotions,
and the pain and hurt, I finally noticed off to my side, Esther had come to sit
by me, and someone else I cannot place. Their faces remained unknown and unseen
to me. Finally, I saw my dad walk over, and place his hand gently on Esther and
my head, patting them slowly. Strangely enough, he wore his white lab coat, and
he stood with a stoic face, much like his usual face at work.
The girl had quickly transformed yet again—this time, her
body took on an even frailer, smaller size, and her hair turned a dark, jet
black. She looked like a girl from my parents’ church that I recognized. I
suddenly turned my face away, afraid to look at the girl I was almost ready to
kill, just as she had killed my friends.
As I felt my body heaving and shuddering, I suddenly felt
conscious of my tears, and my heavy breathing, bringing me back into waking.
