• Is it all a dream? If so, then how do we escape the confinement of our conscious rest.

    The door is locked.

    A man of whom I share no recollection to speaks the rasp of a devil’s throat. His tone of voice carries a tedious pitch, as his apathetic expression contradicts the menacing declarations of his report. A helpless irritation dominates my deficit body, and I lunge my senseless fist into a haze of false perceptions, but am surprised as my knuckles strike the mound of cropped skull before me. The man that spins around is familiar; the sun seemed to dine upon his flesh in vibrant luminosity, as if he existed in the single spotlight of renown. He was the same man in who spoke the words from the box in the window, the same man in whom I wished to pierce with the assailing of this hammer to the nail of my fist. I look away in embarrassment, unable to find the proper blend of terms to accompany the ambiguous gesture I had recently conferred. He then shakes my hand and signs a piece of notebook paper as a gift.

    As I trot from this stance, a child halts his hungry stride. He stumbles, though, nobody notices. Then the boy, inebriated by the very curiosity in which he learned to apprehend, perishes promptly at the sight of his peers. He dies, struck by the deathly hammering sensation of the horned presence that subsists upon his shoulder. He attempts to utter a last word from his dry and squandered tongue, but only a bloody organ is coughed from his throat, to splat on the floor as a piece of meat waiting to be torn apart. Still nobody concerns themselves with this poor dying boy, and yet, I cannot find the will to stop either. I fear of my correspondence with such a deviant soul, and instead wonder “where are his parents,” so as to take the blame of walking away off my weight. I remain walking down the blood stained sidewalks of damaged earth, in search, but not really looking for anything at all. The battle scars of the floor beneath me are covered in the innocent emission of white chalk, drawn in shapes and colors of all kinds. The boy now lay dead, as the parasites feed on the last of his human flesh, and as the men that live upon these streets trample his body with nothing but a mixture of pity and disgust.

    High above, man builds a stairway to god, as the words on this proclamation take a manifest shade of pure gold. I look around, revolving on the feet that are now stunned to their position, and I see the community, transfixed by the sparkle of this notice, seized up to breach the altitude of a human leap, crafted on long metal shafts. Each person now viewing neglects to realize that their very eyes are being pulled from their sockets, and like a vacuum, are hauled into the blinding sun hung in the atmospheric tapestry. I squint my eyes at the blinding gold above my head, and see the forged signature of this fabricated god, they all believe it is real. I then look down at my feet, and slip them from the leather shoes that now lay stuck in the ground. With a revelation, the sidewalks turn black, and each person is slowly towed into the darkness of the tainted soil, to later bloom as despair. Then, I continue to walk barefoot and endlessly through the graveyard of Main Street South, searching.

    But the key has been buried, and it will never be found.

    Perhaps humanity itself is a diverse network of God’s endless nightmare.