Fever Dreams

★ by Mar Wolf, image by Josh Kern ★

I’m centered in a street that’s divided unevenly by yellow paint. I remember painting this street, for a moment, and then I don’t. It makes my chest feel heavy, and I think about thick-footed tree people and mad cow disease, and I want to throw up. I’m moving, they’re not, I’m moving, they’re not. I want to sit down, but I’m not really tired. I can’t feel my feet, and I’m too scared to look at my hands. I heard once that if you look at your own hands while everything’s getting all mixed up here, the rings and prints won’t exist. I wouldn’t ever care to see that, skin with no ridges. I wonder if I’d be able to see my arm hairs, fair as they are. The street lamp, that is yet to move against my ‘pulsing’ run, is light enough that I should be able to catch them in the light. That’s fine. I lift, palm facing down, and look - I have no arm at all. I pulse. 

Ma’s here, Friar Luca is here, all my grandparents, who I assume are my great and great-great grandparents, all my brothers - no, actually, I don’t know who these people are. Dad’s somewhere, I feel, and there’s my first dog. I want to pinch myself, but I have no arms. It’s kind of passive aggressive to exclude my living dog from this scene. It smells like mothballs, and the one grandmother whose home reeks of them is not present. That feels a little sickening, to see her absence, to smell her so strongly in this - oh. It’s my childhood violin teacher, Claire’s, living room. She lived on a cobblestone street in the North of the city, maybe a town up. I only saw her two years, and I sucked at violin, and I think she forgot what I looked like every time I left. I don’t think she’s here, and part of me thinks she’s just right behind me, waiting, with rosin. 

Ha ha ha ha ha, we are laughing, we are laughing, and now it hasn’t been funny for a while. I feel pretty cool, I feel pretty tall. I look at my legs, I don’t have any. I’m super tall, and I bet my legs should be really straight and narrow and sexy. I think I know these people, they’re tall and straight and narrow, they wear sunglasses in pitch darkness. There’s no stars, but that’s not really a new phenomena. There’s a moon, and sometimes a few, but tonight it’s just us and sunglasses. Maybe I’ve just been wearing sunglasses every time I’m here, maybe there are plenty of stars, maybe I’m an idiot, maybe if I take them off - I have no arms. That’s fine. I blink a few times to see if my eyelashes will rub against glass or plastic, but I’m forgetting about the whole thing already. This is a trendy bonfire, it’s probably really warm here, like Miami or Santa Fe. 

“I think I know these people, they’re tall and straight and narrow, they wear sunglasses in pitch darkness. There’s a moon, and sometimes a few, but tonight it’s just us and sunglasses.”

Not this shit again. I’m in a little chair, but it fits because I am a full child. There’s a king frog or a frog named King in a glass case, and I can hear it breathing from six feet away. It’s my preschool, it’s the only classroom I remember, and it’s called the Blue Room. Everyone’s already gone from the tables, so I know we’ve jumped ahead a few bits. There’s my Ma, and her hair is long, and her eyes aren’t the right color - she looks nice, she looks young. She sits across from me, and I see the hat. It’s pink, and clumpy, and very soft. It exists. I’ve seen it, I’ve worn it, I don’t know if she has it still. I know that I don’t want her to take it off. She hasn’t said anything yet, and I can’t remember if I really want her to take it off. I am paralyzed. 

I’ve got legs, and socks, and roller skates! I’ve got elbow pads, and I can hear Kate Bush! Man, this is great. My little cousins are here, and they’re wearing their Breast Cancer Awareness  swimming caps! They look great, and they’re synchronized ! I’m not worried about if they know what they’re listening to, or if they’ve seen me here too - my middle school gym teacher is here! I wonder if her partner is here too, and she is! Her face is spotted, she’s got skin cancer, but she’s roller skating! Now I’m extraordinarily horny. I’m in the stands! Kate Bush is singing, and it’s remastered, and I’m getting fucked by my Media Studies TA against frosted Plexiglas!

I’m upstairs. Ben is here, but I don’t think this is who he really looks like. The room is hot and small, and I’m Alice or Kong or Skywalker getting smashed between walls. Ben’s mouth is dripping with black, and his teeth soon follow. He was my first boy kiss. He looks horrible. His sister is here, and I wonder if my brother is, too. Ben’s holding one of his teeth out to me, a big and rotten one with a gaping cavity close to the root. If he wants me to take it, he doesn’t seem dissuaded by the fact I have no arms. The tooth drops, and the floor cracks, and the walls close altogether.