Nightmarish

Down the poorly lit streets of Boston donkeys in zoot suits yell for me, white foamy spittle flying from their putrid lips. Their voices follow after me, scathing and terrifying. I don't turn around, but let my feet take me away.
        
            Running, running, running. Away.

I would joke that what I was best at was what I was doing.

            Running, running, running. I laugh.

My laughter trailing after my like dust on a road, irony trickling down my back as I turn a block, weaving through the crowds of everyday citizens. Fear gets the better of me, though, and I trip.

            Over a crack in the sidewalk.

My mother's back will be fine she's been dead for too many years, a giggle escapes my lips and spit flies out hitting me in the cheeks. I flinch disgusted and bump into a balding man with glasses he grunts and I continue escaping an angry tirade about my mistake, and fleeing from the rest.

    Fleeing, fleeing, fleeing. I fly.

As fast as I can, which isn't that fast, but faster than them. I hurl myself into the subway tunnels determined to get lost. Determined to hide. I'm shorter than most, but they're taller than most they might see me. it doesn't help that I might be the only blue haired young woman around. I hunch my shoulders throw on my hood and force myself to slow down.

        I always said that my fight or flight response was heavily geared towards flight.

I can't hear them but that's because the buzz of the subway trains and the chatter of hundreds of people drown out almost everything.


  Except the small voice battering around in my head like some frightened monkey in a cage.


I make my shoulders square and my hood up and my head low, but its kind of like putting a moth amoung butterflies, I'm the odd one out, they find me as quickly as I had tried to hide.

                It was too easy, for them.

Now I push my way through the group of people, terrified like a fox running from hounds. I make it back to the surface breathing deep, trying to rid myself of the stench of body odors and things better left unmentioned, that had infiltrated my senses. I forget for a moment that I have them chasing after me.

       I should have been more careful.

They howl and holler like the rabid beasts they are, instead of what they pretend to be, business men. Again I try to escape, darting through people and squeezing myself through the small spaces between buildings.

               My luck runs out, the fair lady abandons me for another.

As I fall through the crack scrambling for purchase grabbing on to any thing I can pebbles roots and even the damp earth itself I fall gaining scratches and bruises on the way down, as I fall they're looking down, their laughter following after me on the waves of echoes.

              Down, down, down, into nowhere . . .

The air whips me in the face making it hard to breathe, my eyes tear up and I squint trying to see when I'll finally stop falling.

       Down, down, down, into the earth, out of air.

Where all I see is black where I would expect brown I must not be falling as far as I though because the earth is still damp and I am still falling, it seems as if they wouldn't follow me down.

       I wish they had, I was still falling,

At my last ditch attempt to save myself from going splat, I claw at the dirt digging my too short nails into the damp and clutch it for all I am.

               Damn, I wish I hadn't bit my nails, now.

I'm still falling but now it's like sliding and I purse my lips so I wouldn't bite the inside of my cheek, because damn it hurts to hold on. The thought makes me laugh and I choke on dirt.

       All that I think is the damnable song 'Staying's Worse Than Leaving'.

The irony of the situation, so parallel to my own life, before I saw what could not be unseen, funny, because before I wouldn't see and now I had, it would be the death of me.

          See and the blind man picked up his hammer and saw.

Sliding down I looked up, till the ground ran out and I was gripping air with aching fingers. I looked down once more anticipating the worst.

                    I wish I hadn't looked down.

I saw amber liquid rippling with the debris of my last ditch attempt, I heard the gentle clinking of glass meeting with ice but ten times the decibels, I wince as it continued. Looking down and ice floated in amber liquid.

                         Or at least they looked like ice cubes,

Glittering off the small amount of light coming from the crack, it shimmers, held together in a too large for life glass. I hit the water that burns my eyes and nose and throat, hissing and fizzing on my small cuts, I hit my head hard on the water feeling more like I hit it on concrete. Did I imagine the smell? Acrid burning of the liquid in my nose and down my throat.

                          Whiskey?

When my vision blurs and my eyesight dims to nothing and the last thing I see is the small light from the crevice I fell through, but they're gone or at least I think they are, shouldn't this be when I wake up?

This is when I don't wake up.
. . .
I guess it wasn't a nightmare.