Friday, June 7, 2013

Bathroom Monologue: Infestation of Nightmares



Every home in the burg had its share of nightmares. They'd settled out on the slope of an ominous forest, and the looming mountains lengthened night by a half an hour every summer, so it was their own fault. They understood. They accepted responsibility, and considered the number of nightmares that crept into their basements and attics and air conditioning systems to be the price for country living. The rest of the world wasn't exactly a peach.

Mr. Rabbani had lived on the haunted slope for two decades. He kept an array of lamps on starting an hour before dusk and never slept with his feet jutting from the covers. These were reasonable precautions for his mortgage rate. That his only neighbor was an empty house seemed downright funny around Halloween.

Yet one November, Mr. Finkelstein moved into that empty house. It was three days of a veritable haunting, with all the clatter of moving furniture and groaning middle-aged men. Mr. Finkelstein had only a fuzzy notion of how many nightmares lived in the burg, and so he lost a few toenails to one on his first night. The neighbors saw him through his bathroom window around dawn, clutching a flashlight and barricading himself in.

Mr. Finkelstein called the exterminators. They draped and fluffed and flooded the house with sanguine gases that dissolved the first nightmares into dust and shadow, and sent any survivors skittering off the property.

If you've had an infestation of nightmares, you know they don't cease to be once you drive them out, especially when winter is coming. Mr. Rabbani woke on the second night of fumigation, at a spry one in the A.M., to find clawed irrationalities scraping under his floorboards. In the morning he found that some nightmares had pried apart the looser bricks of his foundation and wormed their ways into the crawl spaces of his abode.

Mr. Rabbani could not afford fancy fumigation. He had to go about setting the old glue traps, baiting them with childhood hopes that he was too old to use anymore. It sickened him to find the nightmares stuck to mats, wriggling, striving to terrify. He couldn't kill them. Instead, he would release them deeper up the slope behind his home and hope loudly that they'd not return.

Nightmares are smarter than you think, their intelligence growing with their numbers. Perhaps not so smart as to go away when you hope loudly (there's ample evidence that this makes them worse), but smart enough to realize that your bait is stale and they keep getting trapped on things in your crawl spaces.

Mr. Finkelstein had no glue traps. Instead, he had sundry musty boxes of nostalgia, most of them still sealed, because no one unpacks as quickly as they think they will. No sooner did he forget to fully close the back door one night, then nightmares lurked behind every corner, and infested everything he'd once loved and intended to love again, just as soon as he had the energy to shelve things. He was dozing and sipping a soy latte when a photo of his deceased wife began crying about him never doing the wash. If this doesn't strike terror into your heart, you're not Mr. Finkelstein. Nightmares are personal.

Mr. Finkelstein took it very personally, and in the throes of a panic attack, set fire to his photo collection. He had his psychotherapist talk him down via Skype for five hours. It was very costly.

It was most costly to Mr. Rabbani, because nightmares do not handle psychotherapy well, especially not when their intended victim is awake. Mr. Rabbani was sleeping peacefully until every hair on both of his legs became a rat. It was so sudden that Mr. Rabbani strapped two lamps to his legs to ensure they remained properly-haired and promptly never fell back to sleep.

The nightmares screeched and squelched their way through Mr. Rabbani's crawl spaces for an admirable three days. It wasn't the additional glue traps, or the new nail traps, or the newer-still instant-immolation traps that swayed the nightmares. It was the three sleepless days. Nightmares just can't feed their young in a perpetually wakeful house.

This meant Mr. Finkelstein's bonfire of the memories was highly attended. It was a chill Sunday with a dull regional football game when the four children he'd always imagined fathering began scampering in every room around him, never to be seen, always to be beckoning, always to be asking when they would be allowed shoes as polished as his. His psychotherapist made a pretty penny over voice chat that weekend. Mr. Finkelstein refused to hang up, demanding he be carried with the psychotherapist, via Android tablet, to meals, to bathroom and to bed. Mr. Finkelstein himself refused to go to bed. It seemed his hypothetical children dwindled the longer he stayed up.

Two sleepless men meant quite the famine for those nightmares. A few trickled down the slope to other homes, but so remote were Rabbani and Finkelstein that most could not survive the trek, nor could they be rational enough to give up the temptations of two juicy pieces of prey. Nightmares seldom excel at rationality.

You can still see the swarm of invisible problems on the border between the two properties, rippling, undulating suggestively. They're a good fence that has made two men very poor neighbors. It'll only come down when one of them finally goes to sleep, or dreams of moving out.

31 comments:

  1. Those nightmares certainly know how to hang on and keep coming back don't they!

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  2. I'm glad I don't have intense nightmares.

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  3. And now I am not certain I can go to sleep. You have crafted a truly successful nasty piece here, which is trying to move into my head.
    On an different note. Did you know there is a fourth book in the Gormenghast trilogy? Started by Peake, completed by his wife after his death. I picked it up this week, and hope to get to it this weekend.

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    1. I'd heard of the fourth book, but I've never been enthused about posthumous completion of an author's work. If it wasn't ready for him to share then there would have to be some very context-specific circumstances under which I'd want to receive it. Hope you enjoy it, though.

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  4. Wow, this was great! Loved the mix of medieval and modern here, and the nightmare-as-vermin metaphor. When it comes to nightmares, as with invading rodentia, I would take no prisoners.

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    1. Glad you liked it so much, Larry! How would you handle an unwanted frequency of nightmares?

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  5. Oh, I love where you took this! Whimsical and creepy at the same time. The part about the picture crying really creeped me out!

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    1. It'd definitely unnerve me. That's why I had to use it!

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  6. Poor nightmares -- once large and strong enough to take dreamers galloping across their subconscious, now so small and mouselike they can be caught in glue traps. I wonder if they get together for commiserating drinks with bugbears and fairies.

    The neighbours' attempts at thwarting them were lovely and sweetly useless.

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    1. I believe bugbears and bete noires are regional pests. I can look it up, though.

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  7. I absolutely loved this, John, although the idea of verminous nightmares completely freaks me out! I may have to read quite a lot of something light before bed tonight, so this doesn't come back to haunt me.

    You have so many great details in here - from the sanguine gases to glue traps to the childhood hopes and the musty boxes of nostalgia - and I thought the setting on a haunted hill on the edge of a forest was excellent, with the way the nightmares weasel their way into the two houses and finally form that most disturbing of fences, which keeps the two men from becoming neighbours. And the mix of old and new was great. It felt medieval at times and then he chatted with his therapist on Skype on a tablet at others. Great piece of writing.

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    1. Thank you so much for the glowing words, Kath. You brightened my afternoon with this, and so I have to apologize for any darkening I did to your evening. Sleep safely and remember keep your feet under the covers.

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  8. I almost felt sorry for those poor little nightmares. Great stuff, John. I liked the different approaches of the two neighbours and their innocent (and rather sad) attempts to free themselves.

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  9. So many things I want to quote from this but "Mr. Rabbani could not afford fancy fumigation" and "Perhaps not so smart as to go away when you hope loudly (there's ample evidence that this makes them worse:)" are probably my two favorites :)

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    1. Glad they registered. This voice was just too fun to write in. Thanks for letting me know your highlights.

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  10. loved the concept of a psychotherapy session conducted via skype. Can you imagine the ratcheting up of the neurosis if the line goes down?

    Was it Woody Allen who made a joke about all the babies prevented by the Pill showed up? Maybe it was a British comic, bit too menacing for Woody

    marc nash

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    1. I am pretty sure that joke was Steven Wright. It's his darkest joke by far, but also hilarious.

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  11. Those pesky nightmares. Tough to get rid of sometimes. >.>

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  12. Neat story! Love the image of it all. Nightmares can be a bit tough to get rid of, that's for sure.

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  13. Wow and I thought I had problems with the neighbours...this was such an interesting premise and so well executed. What will happen when they fall asleep?

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  14. Creepy and odd and fun to read. I like the idea of nightmares as vermin.

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  15. John, I very much liked this! It's a wonderful concept and as the others noted, the voice and details kept me reading.

    I think you have a slight typo in the 8th paragraph, 4th sentence. Should it be "began" instead of "to begin"? Or maybe I'm just not putting it together properly in my head.

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  16. Rats on my legs? Ack! I must get that picture out of my head before I can sleep tonight. Fun story though.

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  17. Loved this manifestation of the Wiswell imagination. Trying to catch nightmares in glue traps, hilarious.

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  18. Can't help wondering how they'd fare if one of those bouncy motivational speakers moved in...

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  19. This will be one of my favorites, John. I love all of the detail, how you portray the nightmares as living things - hell, I even felt a little sorry for them, wriggling on the glue traps and then being slowly starved.

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  20. Personified nightmares - there's a short film in this story. Great fun and genuinely creepy.
    Adam B @revhappiness

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  21. I wonder if the surrounding wildlife has nightmares when they sleep? Could provide sufficient rest bite if so! Also, John, after the 'winter is coming' line, I could think of nothing but Game of Thrones as I read the rest!

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  22. scared the crap out of me.. and now I fear my bed.. thanks John for another highly original and intense flash

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  23. This has a nasty chuckle to it and I loved it! The idea of hanging around nightmares balances on the edge of curious and terrifying!

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