#like 12 inches of warping up and down. across the entire kitchen

[machinerot]

there are beasts trying to emerge from under the kitchen floor

[amateur-troubadour]

The Nebraska Chapter

          When I opened my eyes, I was laying in my bed back home. Or at least it was my bed before I’d graduated high school. We’d gotten rid of it when the basement flooded during my second year of college and the bedframe became warped. Rolling out of it, I realized that I wasn’t just in my high school bed. I was also in my high school body. I’d thought I felt a pound or thirty lighter.

           Being back in high school wasn’t too surprising. The dreams tended to go that way. Something about appearing as the last you that you really felt was you. I can’t remember who told me all of that, but it sounded like a whole lotta horseshit to me. The only reason high school John wasn’t coping poorly with his problems was that he was actively ignoring them. Maybe that’s exactly who I was though, and this trend of tackling issues head-on was causing some dissonance in me.

           I took a couple of groggy steps out of the room and into the rest of the basement. My basement. Not dirty and dark like the house in Iowa, rotted steps and who-knows-whats lurking around the corners. Dirty and bright. Home. Slowly, testing out the limitations of my newly awakened body, I made my way up the stairs. Reaching the top, I heard the familiar “DING!” of our Pizzazz pizza maker. Two Jack’s pepperoni pizzas a day were made on that baby.

           My mother rushed over to take Steven’s pizza off so it didn’t burn. Deftly, she cut it into eight, mostly equal pieces. It was a skill she’d honed every day since Steven had turned 12. He rarely ate anything besides Jack’s pizza, except when he had breakfast. At breakfast, he had six Oreos (or Chips Ahoy if Oreos weren’t available) with milk and a glass of pink lemonade. Steven was a man of routine. After cutting his pizza, my mother added a generous dose of salt and pepper to help the grease go down. She brought him his pizza, still on the cardboard cutting circle, with a cold Dr. Pepper, which she opened for him.

           “When did you start giving him the full pizza?” I asked, announcing my presence.

           They both turned to look at me, and my mother decided that, of the two of them, she should be the one to answer. “You startled me,” she said, beginning to compose herself a bit more, “When did you decide that you were going to wake up?”

           “Right now, I guess. When did you start giving him the full pizza?”

           “I don’t know. Probably around the time you went to visit your friend in Nebraska,” she said, walking back to the kitchen. She’d been cleaning before making Steven’s pizza, it seems. “Why do you ask? Do you think he’s getting fat?”

           “Am I getting fat?” Steven chimed in. Since entering high school, I guess he’d gone down the path of every other high schooler, growing self-conscious about his body. He’d slimmed down a lot. The mandatory exercise classes probably helped. He’d started working out at home too, or at least making an attempt at it. My parents even brought the old exercise bike upstairs into the living room for him.

           “No,” I said, “despite Mom’s best efforts to change that.”

           “Will you leave him alone? You know he only eats pizza.”

           “You never tried to give him anything else.” I knew how this argument would go. I’d had it so many times before with her and, given that I knew I was dreaming and that the whole world around me was based on my mind, I couldn’t imagine it going any differently. Still, it was fun to be antagonistic to her. Small acts of revenge for my childhood.

           “That’s not true. Remember when we tried to tell him we weren’t giving him any more pizzas?”            “And then you caved immediately? Sure.”

           “What’s your solution?”

           “Actually follow through on the threat. Don’t make him pizza. He’ll eat something new, or…” and I turned to Steven, pausing for dramatic effect, mustering the most sinister grin I could, “…he’ll starve.”

           My mom ignored me, but a look of genuine concern flashed across Steven’s face, and I felt guilty for a moment. I wanted to feel guilty about being mean to him sometimes. It had become hard for me to separate him from my parent’s babying though, and I hated the babying. Giving him a good scare was like pushing back a little bit, like teaching him his first swears or where to safely watch porn online.

           I walked over to Steven and sat in the recliner beside him. He had his little setup in his own recliner beside the window, looking over the fenced-in backyard. Two TV trays: one for his laptop, permanently on, usually browsing YouTube or DeviantArt; the other for anything else he might need at the time, like notebooks for drawing his comics or, as was the case right now, an entire pizza. Steven more or less owned the living room, forcing my parents to watch TV upstairs. He went on kicks of watching and then rewatching the same movie or show all day, and the big TV with surround sound was the best place for him to do it.

           “What’re we up to today bud?” As per usual, Steven immediately closed all his tabs when I approached. I knew what he was doing. He was looking up drawings of cartoon women with large waists in the middle of the day, in front of God and everyone else. On the times that I looked through his notebook like the nosey older brother I am, I saw that he’d begun drawing his own cartoon women too.

           “Nothing.” He stared at me for a bit and realized I didn’t plan on going anywhere. “Say John,” he began, firing into his question voice, “have you seen the Rise of the TMNT on Nickelodeon?”

           “I can’t say I have. I don’t watch too much TV.” I gave him the same smile as earlier, “It rots your brain.”

           “Well,” a pause as he processed how to take my joke, “you should watch it. It’s funny.”

           “I’ll get around to it, I’m sure.”

           I’d been led to believe that, when you realized you were dreaming, you could do anything you wanted. I never had that kind of luck. Anytime I realized I was dreaming, like I had now, it was always because whatever demons leading me on a goose chase had something new to show me. Well, what is it? Where are you sending me next? Get to the fucking point already. I hadn’t done much scavenging yet, but they’d already dragged me halfway across the country. How long would it be before I had to make an effort at renewing my passport?

           “John,” I heard my mother calling, “would you come here for a second?” She was in the laundry room right off the kitchen. Standing from my chair, I marched my way there like a prisoner to the electric chair. Slow, slouched, resigned. She was folding my clothes in her own system that I’d never quite understood. She was really picky about it though. When she saw I was there, she held up a plaid crew sock. Along the side of it was the phrase “busy making a fucking difference” in all capital letters. I couldn’t imagine someone actually making any kind of difference wearing those.

           “Where’d you get these?” she asked. It was a weird question considering I’d had them for well over a year now.

           “I got them when I went to visit Taryn a while back. Some festival or something.”            “Yeah,” she said, “but where did you get them?”

           “I’m not sure I’m understanding the question.” This is what the demon-sent dreams were like. Boring, mundane, but just a little bit off, like the entire world was shifted just three inches to the left. If I didn’t think about it, I might not notice, but I’d been thinking a lot for a while now. I took a good look at my mom now. Sure, her line of questioning was strange, but I realized now that her face was even stranger. Her eyes were too big for a human face by the tiniest amount, and her pupils were just a bit too long horizontally. She always had a thing for frogs.

           “It’s a simple question,” she said as she stepped forward, still holding the sock up for me. “Where did you get the socks John?”

           I began to back up, back into the kitchen. The sun was hidden by clouds, so the light felt very grey. Her legs looked like they were growing longer and blending together, becoming something rather snake-y.

           “Well, Taryn lives in Nebraska, so if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Nebraska,” I had backed up against a counter now, but she was still coming closer. She was definitely half-snake now, and she was very slowly slithering towards me. Her arms began to grow longer, reaching down past where her knees used to be until her knuckles scraped along the floor. It didn’t seem necessary, given the whole slithering-like-a-snake thing, but I could roll with it.

           “What city?”

           It was only at this point that it dawned on me that the dream might be leading me towards Nebraska. Seward, Nebraska, where they threw an annual festival revolving around corn and how much they hated Idaho and their potatoes. With this realization came my mother’s shirt bursting open, revealing leathery wings on her back and a smaller, thicker set of arms beneath the spaghetti ones she used to walk. Guess I never realized how much of a monster I thought my mother was.

           Slowly, one of her long arms grabbed the counter next to me, pulling her close enough for her stronger arms to grab me. I think she tried to smile, but it looked more like baring fangs. Her face had warped beyond anything human, now looking awfully frog-ish. When she blinked, you could still see her eyes, like the eyelids had become translucent. She smelled like fish.

           “I got the message,” I said, trying to get my fingers between hers and my body, trying to pry her grip off of me. “I’ll just go to Seward and work it out from there. Can I wake up yet?”

           “No.” Her voice had changed too. My mom’s voice was still in there for sure, but now I was getting hints of several exes and my third-grade teacher, the one that forced me to write in cursive despite the fact I could barely write in print. People I, at best, hoped to never meet again. “We are beginning to think that you might not be the one we want for this.”

           “Maybe if you told me a little more about what I’m supposed to be doing, I’d be better at doing it. Hard to follow instructions that aren’t offered.”

           “No. We have decided that it is better to dispose of you, be done with all of the delays, find someone stronger to free us.”

           Steven was sneaking up behind the monster, dragging his blanket with him. He didn’t seem the least bit worried about the fact that we might not have a mom anymore. Before the thing could notice, Steven threw his blanket over its head and yanked down, causing it to reach up with all four hands to pull the blanket off.

           “Outside John!” With that, he took off towards the front door. I followed without bothering to put on shoes, something I’d regret once hitting the pavement of the street, but desperate times and all that. We ran about a football field’s worth of dead-end street before we made it to the middle of the intersection leading to the house. There, Steven stopped and turned. Given that he hadn’t steered me wrong yet, I did the same.

           Horror movies like to use the slow, determined monster to scare people. Be it a zombie or some killer like Jason Vorhees, there’s just something terrifying about seeing the inevitability of death personified, marching towards you. I do believe, however, that Hollywood has seriously underestimated how scary death can be when it hauls ass at you like a sports car, 0 to 60 in no time flat. I say this because I practically shit myself watching the frog-snake monster burst from the house and fly towards us.

           Seeing it in action finally gave me a sense of its locomotion that the confined space of the house had kept chained. The monster was very top heavy, so it beat its leathery wings as a way of counterbalancing its forward lean. In addition, it used the long arms as front paws, supporting itself on the knuckles. As it raced towards us, I could see that its fists were beginning to crack and bleed because of how hard it was pounding against the pavement. I tugged at Steven’s shirt to try and get him to move, but he stood still.

           “We really need to go Steven!”

           “I think we should stand here.” He seemed awfully calm about it all, and that calmed me down in turn. He always had a way of making me more resolute. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was the last person in the family to still think I could do something with my life, and I had to live up to those expectations.

           Still, the monster was closing distance far too fast. You know how, when you try and run in a dream, it sometimes feels as if you’re doing the cartoon run-in-place thing instead of getting anywhere? The monster was currently facing the opposite side of that coin. Every one of its movements seemed to cover more ground than any three of mine. I stepped in front of Steven and closed my eyes. The best way to take a hit is to be as unaware of it as possible.

           And then there was a sizzle, a scream not quite human, the smell of frog legs, and finally the feeling of the sun hitting my face. I opened my eyes.

           What had been my mother was slowly burning to ash in front of me on the ground, a single long hand laying at my bare feet, completely skeletonized. The sun had formed bright, painful blisters all over the creature’s body, and I could still hear the sizzling as it was cooked alive.

           “Maybe…” it croaked, “…we’ve underestimated you. Free us.” The rest of it became ash, leaving only charred bones in its wake.

           I turned to Steven, exhaled for a long time, and asked him how he knew that would happen.

           “How did I know what would happen?”

           “The sun. The monster. The way the sun melted the monster. Any of that would be fine.”

           He thought about it for a second, really mulling it over, before he gave me a smile, the kind I gave him when I teased him. Slowly and deliberately, he said, “I don’t know. It’s your dream.”

           “You’re a killjoy.” I walked closer to what had been the body of the monster, some six feet away from its outstretched arm. It had truly been some kind of hideous creature, like something you could imagine lived off of a diet exclusively composed of babies. The depravity of evil knows no bounds. I’d read that somewhere, I’m sure.