Author's Notes: This was also an experiment. Please excuse the confusion.
Nightmares in adulthood are often associated with outside stressors or exist concurrently with another mental disorder. Ken just wishes they would stop.
Oneirophobia
9.
It was, it is, it will be so hard to tell what the tense is . . .
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He will be in a church—the same church they had the funeral for his brother in. Pews, rococo architecture, dark wood and stone, breathtakingly high ceilings, holy water, muted sunlight. Clarinet music that sounded like a sorrowful alto voice floats in invisible rings around the sheer columns, rotundas, balconies, altars. Sealed windows, brightened with sunlight, will provide stained glass depictions of saints and trumpeting angels and the sacred Trinity. The music is so quiet, so pious, like the hushed voices of a church choir but not quite. Soloist. Soaring.
On the far side of the church, where the Kaiser is waiting for him, there will be a wall lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of candles. Mismatched rainbow, wax drippings, diffused flames, giant brass snuffer, extinguished forever, smoke, clarinet music. There are (always always always)small deaths here. Ken could see the mourners sitting on rotting pews, heads bowed, reverent before their Incomprehensible, hoping to build bridges to Heaven, crying unabashedly, hiding small denials and smaller smiles, running away without moving, taking cover. Alive. Breathing. Dead.
As he walked down the aisle, feeling rather like a bride but not as giddy as one, he gets caught on the wrist by one of the mourners. Strong grip, small fingers, whitening knuckles, too-bright smile under a funereal veil—a chessboard, black and white and black and white from the dark lace and whites of her eyes. Demanding, angry, mournful, terrified, curious, betrayed, hateful, loving, come home come home to me. Rosa will want to know the answers to questions never conceived. Early miscarriages.
"Why don't you ever dream about me?"
"I don't know."
"You always dream about Motomiya or the Kaiser."
Tears glint like the edges of knives as they trickled down her cheeks. The widower's shawl around her shoulders, the smudged eyeliner for a girl too young to be wearing makeup, the deathly grip, just barely hanging on, so lost in grief, about to be swept away. They met once(fell in love, she thinks, cradling her pillow and dreaming forever), but that was ages ago.
"Maybe."
"What about me? What about the rest of your friends?"
"Let me go."
"You sick fuck!" she will exclaim shrilly. "You don't even dream about your own Digimon!"
"Sure he does."
The Kaiser: smooth as cocoa butter, sophisticated, embarrassed fumbling in the shower, questions (what does it mean to be attracted to yourself?) and no answers and even less coherency, biting wrists, narcissismnarcissismnarcissismSTOP, breaking, bondage, pain, laughter in front of a mirror. The altar he's leaning against is cold like a dead person's cheek, but twice as smooth. He pushes off of it, smiles, and walks closer. No more clarinet music, but something lower and brassy will be there instead, something growing.
"Leave Ken alone!"
His smile was that of an angel's. "Wormmon is right over there."
The stone basin, glassy eyes, shriveled entrails, halos of flies, shit-smeared, terrible, an atrocity, strangely shaped knives with edges glinting like tears, SACRIFICE ("You'd do anything for me!"), broken exoskeleton, red on green like Christmas. Help me.
"Stop it! Just go away!"
Be, sound, float, wait, able to, walk, want, drip, wait, stop, stop, stop, stop I want to wake up please don't make me have any more of these nightmares I can't I can't take it. Rain, sex, burros, collars, do you see, accidents, cooking, curettes, ocean. Claimed. Marked forever, damned, lost lost lost lost lost and in need the road map for life. Apples. Ryo's smile. Help me. Atonement. Help me.
"Ken!"
Heart attack.
Treacherous gnat.
Useless, pathetic gnat.
Help me.
Badum . . . badum . . . badum . . .
I'm sorry.
Ba . . .
"Why?"
Goodbye.
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Now which tense did I choose?
