The Date

 Dreams are weird. For a few hours each night your mind takes a vacation from reality and sends you to a different universe where your pants can suddenly disappear in the middle of a speech, to being able to fly across the world faster than the speed of light. Yet when you're dreaming you have no idea that you are, even if something feels off you take it for what it is, live in that weird world for however long it takes your alarm to awake you then wake up and promptly forget everything about your dream.

My prompt today is to try my hardest to remember a dream I had recently and write about it. Well I had a dream and that morning I immediately text a friend of mine about it just so I can write the basics of it. (I think she was very confused until I told her why I told her about my dream). I don't remember much other than it delt with me, a mysterious girl, my roommate and some guy I never met, oh and there was this weird feeling the entire scene was scripted. The scene I remember the most from this dream is described below:

            “Hey you,” she said, no recited.

            “Hey,” I recite back, “have we met?” I try to remember where I’ve seen her before, I knew I am supposed to do something with her, or she is going to do something with me? But my memory betrays me. All I know are our lines, our lines from a script we’ve never read nor scene.

            “Don’t be stupid, of course we haven’t or you would have recognized my face.”

            I look up from the table and see her standing right before me. Her hair was short and dark, only falling slightly below her jaw line, her skin was white with a slight tan (or is that just the dull lighting of the room?), and her face… Well I can’t remember her face but I think it was attractive, I’m just not sure how or why.

            “I don’t recognize your face,” I recite. Who would have written such a stupid line?

            “Good,” she says sitting down at the table. The candle light between us dances across her forgotten face.

            “What do you want?” I ask.

            “You,” she says. “I want you.”

            I know what’s going to happen next, I’m going say 'What do you want?' then my roommate is going to cut me off, entry stage left. Before I say anything I look around the room for signs of him. The room was empty except for identical tables to the one that this mysterious girl and I sat at. I look her in the eyes, those long forgotten eyes. Her expression is blank like a robot, it unnerves me. I give the room one final skim without turning my head; it would appear a table transformed itself into a grand piano when I wasn’t looking, nothing strange about that.

            “Why do you want –.”

            “Hey Kyle,” I hear the voice of my roommate say. She doesn’t seem to notice.

            I look to my left, and there he is, just as the script said. Yet he’s with someone else, someone that, like this girl, I don’t recognize nor remember his face.

            “Hey Daniel,” I recite.

            They walk closer. “Have you met Charles?” Daniel asks.

            “No,” the girl and I recite together. I turn to look at her, she gives me a scowling look, like it was I who took her line, but I clearly knew it was her that took mine. Plus Charles was never on the original script, how could she, or I for that matter, know what to say?

            “Oh alright,” Daniel says and begins walking towards the piano, Charles following right behind him.

            “Let’s keep talking about you,” the girl says.

            “Umm,” I scratch behind my ear as I’m supposed to, the script said nervous tick after all, “alright. What do you want to know about me?”

            “I want to know why you don’t want me.”

            “I never said that.”

            “You didn’t have to. I can tell how you didn’t recognize me.”
             "Because you said we never met" I say. She gives me the same blank stare. “Well,” I say looking into her eyes; piano music fills the air, “what’s your name?”

            “You don’t even know my name?”

            I search my memory, maybe it was on the script somewhere but I forgot it, or maybe we were friends outside of the two characters we were playing.

            “Is it Sara?” I ask, clearly knowing that like Charles that line was never on the script.

            "No, it's Sarah, with an 'h.'" She leans over and whispers to me: “Don’t you forget your lines.”

            On cue, my mind went blank, like words on a white board being cleaned away. With my mind now blank you would expect me to be even more confused, but in fact I was the opposite: I was free of the script.

            “Don’t worry,” I say leaning back in my chair, “I already have.”

The Call of the Void

I am afraid of heights, probably not more so than most people though. I don't mind the height, I can gaze in the abyss just fine, as long as I know I have some sort of safety net, like a railing or what have you. Sean gave me the prompt "Write about your biggest fear" and since that was the first one that popped into my mind I thought I should write about it. But after further inspection I realized that my fear was pretty normal, so I decided to use a writer's best tool: the ability to delve into the world of the imagination to upgrade my fear to a phobia, acrophobia to be exact, the fear of heights.

It’s called l’appel du vide, the call of the void. The call is so clear and loud and yet it makes no sound, I want to jump but I know I shouldn’t. My eyes are fixated on the red rust of the abyss directly below my feet. I feel as if I’m not standing on the solid ground I swore I was on just a few minutes ago, that the ground was taken from me and replaced with this void that only knows my name. My feet tremor as they fight the pull of the void, cold drops of (sweet or are the tears?) roll down my face their saline content flowing into my mouth. There are faces clad in hats and sunglasses all around me, looking in every direction but mine, they don’t understand the danger they’re all in, that the void beneath our feet is calling out to each and every one of us, waiting to consume us. My love’s face was among them, but now I cannot find her. I need to find a railing to hold onto, some sort of safety net. My feet give way.

I feel the pull of the void crescendo faster and faster to the center of infinity, as my speed increases I can feel the time around me decrescendo to a standstill. The faces all turn to look at me, I cannot see their eyes but their mouths are open and long, their brows raised in the middle. They know the danger they are in. They now know the danger of the void, they have seen one of its victims, and they are too late. Still no sign of Amy, maybe the void already consumed her. The faces disappear into bright blue, I was alone. I close my eyes as my lungs exhale all their air in a high pitched scream.

Thud! I landed on something, something solid and hard. The air returns to my body, my diaphragm convulses over and over again just to be sure. I was safe, for now.

“Is she okay?” I hear a voice say.

“What should we do?” Another one says.

I caress the solid surface with my hands; it’s smooth and warm, and real. Memories began flashing back to me, but their details aren’t fully clear yet. Vacation is a word that sticks in my head, another: canyon. I open my eyes gazing into the bright blue above me, sky, that’s another word.

“Jessica!” I hear shout over the mummer of voices; it was Amy’s, “Jessica!”

“Amy, where are you?” I call out, quietly.

My heart rate slows. I’m safe, I think. The memories come back quicker and clearer now, like a film in my head. The Grand Canyon, that’s where I was. I came here with Amy to celebrate our one year together, I was initially hesitant but she won me over, she always wanted to visit. Stupid, I think as the world became clearer to me, I never told her about my acrophobia, not once since we began dating.

“Jessica,” I hear her sign in relief. Her face like an angel’s sent down to protect me from the damn tourist attraction we ventured on, the Sky Walk, “I thought I lost you.”

“I did too,” I say taking her hand. My feet still tremble, but as long as I have her I know I’ll be safe. “Can we get off this stupid thing?”

“What happened?” She asks as we transition back onto the dusty path.

“I may have forgotten to tell you something about me,” I say.

The Clock and I

            The clock winked at me as I walked out of the dark abyss of my bathroom. The face on the grandfather clock, just winked at me. Was that face always there? I thought it was just all numbers and a few spinning hands, since when did it get a face? As long as I have lived in this house it’s never grown a face. I cut my staring contest with the clock to observe the walls melting around me, I felt the cloud like carpet flow like a river beneath my feet, and looked back at the clock.

It didn’t wink this time. Instead the face had melted into itself. All swirly and disfigured, it made me think of those funhouse mirrors. Its form kept on changing, the minute hand sped up at an astounding pace but the hour hand remained cool and collected, never moving from the clock’s rippling while surface. I wanted to tell Jordan, but the size of my house had grown significantly in the past few hours, and I didn’t want to interrupt her journey.

My eyes drifted downwards to the pendulum. I watched the pendulum swing back and forth, and then back and forth again. It was behaving oddly, well differently than I thought it was supposed to, but I never really paid attention to it. At the peak of its swing, the brass pendulum moved at rocket like speeds as if it were trying to escape its eternal servitude of the clock. It reminded me of life, how we’re all slaves to the machine known as society. As it made its journey downwards the giant brass lever’s velocity plummeted to just a fraction of its speed, all the while phantom-doppelgangers of the pendulum followed suit behind it. After what felt like life time, a life time I envision I spent with Jordan, the pendulum sped back up, reaching the apex of its swing, leaving the doppelgangers behind.

I sat and stared at the fascinating mechanism for a child like curiosity, but an old man’s wisdom. I wondered how something so simple could measure something so complex and mysterious like time, but yet I knew the struggle of the pendulum. It wanted to break free, but it also knew it was important for the clock to live on. It was the heart of the machine, the reason the elaborate series of gears could turn the hands on the face. That’s a weird thought, why would a face need hands? I have forgotten about the face of the clock, how could I? It did complement me with a wink earlier. I stood back up to gaze at the face.

The face on the clock was back on the clock’s face. I observed every detail of the face, the perfectly beautiful face. It was the pale face of Jordan embossed into the blazing white background of the clock. Her eyes, next to the ten and two positions were large and full of life. Her lips hovering just right above the six bore her signature smirk. And her nose sat cutely in the middle of the face.

I took a step back to gaze upon the beauty; it was the most beautiful clock I’ve ever seen. I soaked in the moment for a few swings of the pendulum, a few lifetimes with Jordan. Then my eyes spied something I didn’t notice before, the hour hand laid near the three positions and the minute hand laid a few ticks ahead of the nine. I suddenly saw Jordan baring an awkward mustache. A chuckle escaped my lungs, followed by another. A picture of Jordan’s face with Mario’s mustache invaded my head, and a tsunami of laughter escaped my mouth.