Lex Sonne

A DREAM WITH DOGS             I was in a three-story Victorian home on an island somewhere off the east coast of Mexico. Hot as hell. There was a party. I was trying to stay sober. I was in white trunks. My father and mother were there with hundreds of people from back home: my drunk uncle, the veterinarian; my apocalypse-predicting drunk grandfather, the surgeon; my ex-girlfriend’s drunk father with his red cheeks and thin lips; her terribly bored mother with a smile and pearl earrings; friends I didn’t talk to anymore; guys who once wanted to kick my ass; guys who kicked my ass; and Anne Boone, my best friend from first grade. Everyone was packed in the house sweating and boozing, my father and mother and relatives and everyone. I kept trying to get to the upper stories of the house to jump out the window, but an older woman with rough hands kept pulling me back, kissing my cheek and saying, “Son, there isn’t anything up there. The party is down here.” Then my mother was gone. She had left, drunk, on a yacht with a man, not my father. They were over a mile out to sea and a storm was pushing in from the southeast. I could see it, and the rest of the party could see it, but no one seemed to give a damn. I was peering out of a window of the house, and the house was wood and bleached alabaster white like it had drifted on the sea for years before it was thrown onto the shore of this island for this party where everyone was drunk and I was trying to get to the upper stories to jump out the window. Then my mother was in the yard calling to me from a white bench below a young walnut tree with a single blue and silver Christmas ornament hanging from one of its branches. I tried to get to her but I had to crawl on my stomach like a soldier, and the grass had turned to nails the color of gunmetal, and I was inhaling the nails then coughing them back up; nails being sucked down hard and fast, sticking in my lungs and esophagus then coughed up with phlegm and drool and blood and yellow pieces of my lungs and esophagus, the bloody nails pouring out with the mess, all of it dripping from my chin, and the clean gunmetal nails sucked back in with each breath. I pulled myself up to the bench under the walnut tree with the silver and blue ornament and she was gone, back out at sea with the man, not my father because he was still drinking bourbon in the alabaster house, and the storm had started to spin and was pulling the fish-smelling air and the salt water and sand into it, and I opened my mouth and all of the nails with the phlegm and drool and blood and yellow pieces of my lungs and esophagus were sucked out of me, into the storm.             I walked back into the house and asked my father to pour me a drink. He slapped me on the back and said, “There you go. I knew you’d come around.” I drank it and slapped him on the back and said, “I’m going to get some blow.” He smiled and said, “Whatever you want, son. Whatever makes you happy.”             I started down a dirt road on a cliff over the sapphire sea with the soft dirt sticking to my bare feet and the loose sand blowing and swirling around my ankles. I walked, then jogged, then walked and came to a shack being built by hunched and toothless natives with tobacco-colored skin and black gums. Two of them, a sturdy man with black dreaded hair and a brittle woman, her head shaved and shining white in the sun. A pack of feral dogs moved around the side of the shack past a porcelain bathtub that sat on a makeshift rock porch. Six of them; small, dirty-white terriers that had been pulled apart at the midsection. Narrow strips of their blackened muscle and tawny viscera hung from their ribs and dragged in the dirt and the sand. They pulled their back halves behind them, the dirty-white fur gone on the side that was dragged. The dogs crept forward with their front legs then reached back with their black snouts and yellow teeth to jerk the back half up beside their front. They moved together, the six of them, across the backyard of the shack which blocked the hot wind from the sea. They inched toward me whimpering, crawling, then pulling, then crawling, then pulling and rubbed against my legs with their stinking bodies, parts of their viscera pulling off and sticking to my bare feet. The man and the woman didn’t speak. They looked down at me from the rafters where they were nailing down sheet metal and grunted, showing me their blackened gums, then opened their mouths wide and let out a moan that grew like dawn into a screech from their guts. The man pulled his sweat-soaked black mane over his shoulder, turned his head back and forth studying me in my white trunks while the sweat poured from his scarred and sun-beaten face, showering like rain onto the white translucent floor, then dropped his hair and went back to hammering the sheet metal to the rafters of the shack; the woman with her head the color of her skull, handing him nails when he reached toward her.            The road turned inland and I followed it, the sun beating down on my back, me incessantly placing my hand on my shoulder to feel the skin that had begun to blister and crack. I came to a crossroads. A blacktop slab stretched out to the east and west. Out of the distant haze, a yellow cab appeared. I held my hand out and the cab flew by, a Mexican behind the wheel in a pink ball cap staring at me with an enormous grin and his right hand held up in stiff wave. The breaks screeched and the car slid to a stop thirty yards away, its tires smoking. The Mexican revved the engine, threw the cab in reverse, and slammed the gas. He jerked to a stop beside me with that same grin and his hand still up in a wave. There was a black bull stitched above the brim of his pink ball cap.            “Where are you going?” he asked.            “I need some blow.”            He pointed to the passenger door.            A mile down the road I asked again. I sniffed and wiped my nose and said, “Some blow?”            “In your lap,” he said.            There was a plastic baggie with a half ounce on my white trunks.            I wanted him to take me to a small house with overgrown bushes covering the windows. In the house would be the man with the black mane and the woman with her head the color of her skull. They would stink of urine and sweat and earth, and I would share the coke with them and watch them snort it into their burnt, blackened nostrils. We would laugh and drink bourbon from the same glass and share cigarettes.            I asked the Mexican if I could do a line in the car. He said, no, then yes, then passed me a yellow newspaper from the floorboard.            I kept having the same dream. Sometimes there were six dogs. Sometimes there were more.       - - - - - -

Lex Sonne grew up in central Kentucky. His fiction has appeared in Night Train, New Madrid, Ghost Factory, and Hair Trigger. A book of his short stories will be published by Lark Sparrow Press in 2010. He is the Co-Founder and Editor of the literary magazine Somnambulist Quarterly and teaches at Truman College in Chicago.