The Interzone...

I had a strange dream this morning.  (Oh, what I wouldn't give for the ability to come up with something interesting to write about on my own, at will, and not have to rely on the random firings of comatose neurons in order to conjure my art from the void.  But that's a worry for another day.  For now, I'll take what I can get.)

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I let three birds fly into my home.

Then I laid down on my couch to watch them.

I was paralyzed as I lay there, unable to move.

One of the birds, the smallest one, kept turning into a young woman.  She wore a t-shirt of alternating thick blue and yellow horizontal stripes, white shorts, and white canvas topsiders.  She was sitting on my living room floor, using one of my laptops.  She wasn't beautiful, but she was very attractive.

And while she wasn't quite masturbating, she seemed like she was building up to it.

She was rubbing her hands all over her body with sensuous intent, as she stared transfixed at the laptop screen, her face awash in bluegreen glow.  Every once in a while she would lift her shirt up to run her hand across her belly, or up over one of her small breasts.

Unsurprisingly, I was completely entranced by her.  I could not look away.

I knew she was really a bird, but that didn't seem to make any difference.  Every once in a while she would turn back into a bird again, or I would see her as a bird again, just for a moment.  And in those moments, I could see the other birds, too.  They were poking holes all throughout the walls of my apartment.  Burrowing into them, building nests.

I didn't care.  Couldn't care.  Couldn't even imagine caring.  All I wanted was to keep watching this young woman enjoying herself at whatever it was she was doing.

But suddenly, all too soon, she was gone.  The room had gone dark, like the sky outside was ready to storm.  The walls were crumbling and full of holes.  And I was staring at an image of myself on the floor in front of the laptop, where the birdgirl had been; a projection of my own unconscious creation, from myself to myself.

With this realization, I could move again.

As I started to rise from the couch, I heard a crunching noise behind me.  I stood and turned, to see my living room in a fantastical state of decay, and crawling all over with the most enormous bugs I have ever seen.  The walls and front door were wet, rotten planks of wood, layered with moss a foot thick, like a fallen tree that had been rotting on the forest floor for fifty years.  Indeed, the advanced state of woodland decay displayed in my living room gave off a distinct Rip Van Winkle feel, and I found myself afraid that I might have been watching that girl for a hundred years without even knowing it.  Dark stormlight poured in through the holes between the rotten planks of door and wall.

And the bugs!  Oh gods, they were everywhere.  And they were enormous.  The size of guinea pigs.  Long, beetle-like things, with pincers like serrated scissors on their heads.  Thank the Sun they didn't seem capable of flying.  But they were crawling all over everything.  I could hear them chittering behind the walls.  They crunched under my feet as a I walked.  I discovered that a large portion of them appeared to have been torn apart, their carapaces left discarded about the floor like crushed, empty walnut shells.

I realized that the birds had been eating them.

I stooped to examine some of these remains.  They were covered in this sticky brown goo, like a cross between molasses and motor oil.  It was all over the place.

It was at this point that I began to have a freak-out.

I ran down the hall to the back of my apartment, screaming for help, and found a girl there that I know from the IOT in waking life.  She was cleaning my apartment.  It was completely spotless back there, in fact; no evidence at all of the chaos from the front rooms.  She didn't live there, and we weren't lovers (either in or out of the dream), yet it didn't strike me as at all odd that she was cleaning my home.

I tried to describe the situation to her, screaming hysterically, but she was completely nonchalant about the whole thing.  Very, "yeah, yeah, I'll be right there; let me just finish this first."  Which only made me panic more, as if she didn't understand the gravity of the situation, or wasn't taking me seriously enough.  So I started to freak out on her even more, to try and get across just how seriously fucked everything actually was.  I held out my hands to show her as evidence.  They were cut up and bleeding, apparently from the bugs.  But she still didn't hurry.

Eventually, at my desperate pleading, she followed me out into the living room, to see the destruction I had been raving about.  She was not impressed.  Nor was she particularly concerned.  It seemed as if she viewed it all as just one more mess to tidy up.

I began to run around the apartment, frantically closing all the doors and windows, of which there were suddenly way too many - more than was rational - and all of which were wide open.  I crushed several of the giant beetlebugs in various window frames, as I closed the windows on them.  I didn't actually want to kill them, surprisingly; I was just afraid to touch them to move them out of the way.

I flung open my front door to try and sweep the forest of decay and bugs outside, and in so doing let in warm Spring sunlight, and a life-scented breeze.

And the birds. 

All three returned.

But whether to watch, or to help, or to hinder, or to take me away, or otherwise end me, I will never know.

Perhaps one day I'll remember.