fiction

I've been having some strange dreams lately.

Not like normal strange dreams, like being in math class naked and being called to the blackboard or any of that shit. I mean, hell, normally I only remember bits and pieces of my dreams anyway, but these... these ones have been crystal clear.

There's this one, I'm in a park or a playground or something. There's benches, because I'm sitting on one, reading a newspaper, and that's when I first start to realize it's a dream, because I don't read the paper. Hell, I barely catch the news one night in five. Anyway, there I am, and I can see playground equipment and a sandbox, you know, little kid shit like that. And I can hear kids playing, only I can't see them. Like I'm always looking in the wrong direction. I look over at the swings, and there's no one there, but the swings are moving like the kids just got off of them.

Then I look back at the sandbox, and there's a kid. Okay, finally. He's playing by himself, and he's building some little sand city or something, and he's got toy trucks or something around him.

And that's when things start going bad.

All the other noise stops. Like you hit the mute button in the middle of a crowd of people cheering, it's that noticeable. One second, the sound of kids playing, then nothing.

And then I really start to focus on the kid in the sandbox. Try to figure this shit out. Because I know I'm dreaming now. So this kid has to mean something. Like, maybe he's me when I was a kid, right?

That's when I see... those aren't toy trucks and stuff like that around him. Dead birds, a squirrel.... a puppy, lying on it's side, flies crawling on it. And the kid just keeps playing in the middle of this. Making little mounds of sand, scooping out little valleys and roads. And then he looks over at me, and I wake up, screaming.

Because he's not a little kid. It's like something heard about kids but had no idea what they really looked like, and got the size and the shape kinda right, but that's where it ends. It's face is all wrong, all flat and smooth in the wrong ways. And it's eyes.... black, and glittering, and dead.

The last time I had this dream, afterwards, stumbling into the kitchen to get some coffee and a smoke, I couldn't look out the window. Because my view is a playground, across the street. I can't look that way anymore, because I'm afraid. Afraid that it's the same playground, that I'll see that thing hiding as a kid.

I don't know what worries me more. That my dreams might be real, or that I might still be asleep,