Kick Drum Heart

I’ve been having some unusual dreams lately.

It’s really not unlike me to encounter some weird ones. I’ve chilled with a werewolf who was actually my cousin’s buddy, broken Caitlin out of a whorehouse and waltzed with Nick Jonas.

And I have to say, I’ve had some really bad dreams. I’ve fought off a cannibal banshee who used my bathtub as her fortress (the bleeding strips of entrails dripping from the curtain rod didn’t really entice me into showering the next morning, let me tell you). I have catapulted off of a cliff with a girl I hated.

I have seen my dead dog, alive, and pleaded with her not to burn alive. I’ve raced into similar fiery infernos to save my sister (who ended up a blackened, crispy husk). I’ve been pregnant and alone in a Chinese stable, for God’s sake.

But the past two nights I’ve been haunted.

The night before last, my mom was sick. I watched her seize and convulse viciously until the pain in her head killed her. I kept telling myself, as she became unrecognizable (similar to an orange rind, oddly), that she wasn’t dead, she wasn’t dead. She was fine, she would get better. A little Mexican man kept trying to tell me that, too. Then he told me my dad had cut himself. I raced to the back porch and expected to see his wrists slashed.

No. He slumped against the pool with his throat slit in two places.

For some reason I was talking to him about Doc and Grandma, though. Reassuring him that she never meant to destroy the illusion he’d held of his mother and father and fidelity. I discovered then he’d been cutting himself for years because of them.

Then last night, I dreamed for the second time in my life that I died.

The first time was two or three years ago. Jaws’ sister bit me in half. It was a sweet death, calming and walm and dark and peaceful. I didn’t feel a thing but a pleasant crushing sensation and waiting, warm blue.

Last night, I dreamed that a boy I know– a boy I know that has liked me and been a creeper so I ignore him– brought a gun to school. A small pistol. The light was bright and crayon yellow, crayola orange. Desks were smooth and gray and he simply swung the pistol around the room. Angry at us. Angry at existence. My heart hammered as a glint off the muzzle– silvery, spark– shone as he pulled the gun in a swift arc until it faced me.

All along I’d been terrified, immobile with horror, thinking that my friends were going to die. Thinking that this abhorrent tragedy had really arrived at Gowanda and landing with both murky, mucky feet.

But no. The words that came out of his mouth were, “I was going to kill them all. But I won’t. Instead I’ll kill you.” And the last thing I saw was the hate blaze in his eyes. Any hurt remaining was seared away by the anger.

The last thing I felt was the crack-crack! of my ribs and the puncture of my lung as the blast of two shots ripped through my chest.

This death wasn’t a peaceful one. Not in the least. I remained a ghost, transparent and lonely, listening to the aftermath.

I was the only one who’d been murdered. Just me.

And I heard the wrenching sorrow that flooded my mother’s heart. The abandonment of my sister’s. The confused and regretful pulse of my dad’s. I experienced the hurt that me, leaving, would wreck upon my family. I watched, helpless, as acquaintances of my family told my parents at my wake about what a talent, what a potential I had had. What they had hoped for me.

Then I think my mom wailed, and I woke up, crying. My mom never wails.

God, I wish I was an insomniac.