The Creature and the Sleeper

The creature and the sleeper somehow occupy the same space of the same time they phase into each other—exchanging and borrowing.

Phantom touch, imagined as a whisper, a tickle, dry crackling skin breaking around his anklebone. Vile and uninvited, the creature crawls, inches, seeps towards the sacrum—where it gestates, waiting.

The Conception

A twinge around the sleeper’s ankle bone would cause semi-conscious realization of a nefarious circumstance. The sleeper would start—eyes open slightly but mind still dull from hours of R.E.M.

The air had turned to elemental mercury, fluid and reflective. The sleeper opened his eyes completely and their sockets were immediately crushed. The sleeper inhaled deeply through his nose.

Chortling and croaking as his lungs filled with the molten metallic air. The bones within the flesh of his arms and legs were pulverized.

It is only the most confounding of journeys which begin with a dream. Our sleeper’s abdomen scrunched together as if expelling the quicksilver which had filled his body. His torso lifted quickly and our sleeper was sprung from his bed. Years would pass, but the sleeper could not escape the night mercury filled air.

Sometimes the creature would enter whisper to the sleeper who would hear an echo when his ears would fill with air, such as a yawn. The pressure of concentrated atmosphere would later be supplemented by other, more conscious, controlled and premeditated, methods of communication between the dimensions of the sleeper and the creature.

The sleeper had always known of the creature which waited inside of his body. But how can one speak of a creature or disease or gift. Perhaps the sleeper was a box filled with the ills, toils and sicknesses which would be wielded against or released upon humankind.

The Water

Our eighteen year old back and sun stroked sleeper, sitting upon a beach after hand stands in the water. His companion was exhausted and slept beneath a fragrant mist of coconut oil. Our sleeper stared thoughtfully into the rippling and reflective water.

While the combination of sunlight and water would normally exhaust him, our sleeper was haunted by words heard, or thought heard in a whisper, while underwater and his muscles clenched and unclenched with newfound energy.

The Mountain

Our twenty year old dharma bum sleeper had finished his ascent and his body no longer responded to his mind’s commands. Now as alone as one could get, his fingers curled and uncurled as firelight shone through the space between them.

As with the water, his body was spun up, wired and his mind raced. Somewhere a coyote howled. The crackling fire consumed a patch of dry leaves. As our sleeper listened to their sizzle, the sound of the fire became steady and rhythmic, no longer sporadic as flame, the sounds had developed a pattern as thought.

The Escape

Our twenty five year old sleeper was told by the doctors that it was a mild case of food poisoning. Our sleeper now lay in bed underneath one sweat drenched sheet and stared at the ceiling tiles when the convulsions began.

First his calf muscles began to clench and unclench, his toes rose in unison towards his kneecaps, then the muscles in his abdomen. Within minutes there was thrashing and flailing, the flesh of his abdomen tore and he was out.

The sleeper could no longer deny the existence of the creature once it had become manifest and tangible. Years had passed since the dream which would never reoccur but would often leach into his subconscious during daydreams. When it was expelled it was not painful, more as of a relief.

The creatures language, the voice from the sleepers mind, cycled through the blues—Delta to Cockney to Chicago to the Swanked Scat of the Cotton Club. The fluid resonance of rushing syllables, with questionable grammar, creative usage of metaphors and flooded with the cryptic calls of slaves planning an escape.

The creatures escape, now guaranteed, had been foreshadowed with years of metaphors, of hints, of promises. Now outside of his womb and the creature sat staring—eyes of a sleeper but face of a creature—a physical embodiment of the subconscious from whence the creature had been conceived or spawned or created.

“I have waited, trapped, while your body napped I was forced in as a sickness for years I’ve bared witness.”

The sleeper lay facedown in the puddle of fluid which had accompanied the creatures expulsion. The creature stood above him. “Never we, never he, you and me, family tree, see how we connected, a new perspective, you infected cured, true see inside of me. Never we, never he, only you and never me, now will cease to be.”

The air turned to elemental mercury. The sleeper was enveloped and became a figment of a whisper of an echo when the creature’s ears would fill with air. He was now the sleeper and creature, as it had always been.