Blue_Opossum

Morning of August 4, 2017. Friday.



I am not of my conscious self, though there are a few threads in which I am aware of a few facets of my identity. I am not sure of my implied age; perhaps it is only about twenty. Mostly, I am only aware of my mother. My mother has recently died. However, I think I can talk with her by initiating some sort of will.

The scene is distorted and my memory is askew. My mother is in the baby cot of our present address, though the baby cot unrealistically accommodates her full height. I do not see it as my present address (even though it is) as I have no discernible memory of my conscious self’s present living location. I speak to her, trying to will her eyes to open, on thought alone. It seems to work at times, but is she really okay with this act, or is she angry at me for “waking” her? Holding her eyes open by my mental will alone eventually seems a bit strange.

I go into a room that might be considered to be my room in Cubitis, last seen in 1978, although I have no memory or viable association with Cubits and the room is different anyway. I realize that keeping my mother’s remains in the box from the Barnabas Collins “Dark Shadows” board game is proving to be problematic. I do not even consider that, realistically, my mother would never have fit in this little pretend coffin of cardboard. By way of a false memory, I know that other people are known to keep the bodies of the deceased around their house. It is not unusual; it is a tradition, and yet, a part of my mother’s remains have leaked from the bottom of the box, like acid from an old battery, reminding me of my Kenner Easy-Show movie projector being ruined by leaking batteries so that I could no longer repeatedly watch the same short Thor and Flintstones cartoons on my Cubitis bedroom’s south wall. (My mother had told me to throw out my movie projector, which had been a combined birthday and Christmas gift from my older sister Carol, and to not touch the leaking batteries that had ruined it.)

The gore may be toxic and I am concerned that I had better not eat or touch my face or mouth until I wash my hands, so that no decaying syrupy gore poisons me. I spend a very long time washing and rinsing my hands under the bathtub faucet. The light is bright and I am actually in our present home, though I am not my conscious self and I have no clue to my real life status. I still have to find a place for the Barnabas Collins cardboard container with the plastic lid, which contains my mother’s remains, even though it is just a little box. I have to bury it somewhere. It is in too poor a condition to keep in the open now.

There is some sort of temporary offset dream, where I find myself living on Barolin Street. Two unfamiliar men seem to think that I have taken their truck. They come in through the back way without even knocking. Apparently, the truck was at the front of my house. I certainly did not steal it. I was not even aware of it. These imposers annoy me. They come back a second time as if I had put it back and taken it again. I certainly had not taken it and tell them so. I do not even know what it looks like.

I have to take care of my mother’s remains in the little Barnabas Collins “Dark Shadows” coffin. Her whole body somehow fits in there, with room to spare. She is on her back in this toy coffin from a board game that I had not seen in real life for many years. I decide to bury it inside a set of concrete steps in the Loomis Street backyard, which is also somehow the Cubitis front yard at the same time. The small set of steps does not go anywhere in particular.

For seemingly a long time, as long as it took me to wash my hands, I dig with my hands in the sand. I feel the sand flowing through my fingers. I do not question how a step in a set of concrete steps could be or become sand, but this is where I will bury the toy coffin.

I dig and dig with my hands, and the oblong hole keeps filling back up, not being quite deep enough for burial. Still, I persist with confidence.

The concrete steps have somehow separated, and have transformed into, or have always been, small cardboard boxes of mostly paperback Gothic novels. The area of the ground I had been digging in looks untouched, and it is now normal soil. Will this work out?

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