Twizzler

Sometimes we all get premonitions. Some of us swear by them while others do their best to ignore and forget them. Sometimes, however, the connection is undeniable.
It was one of those dreams that make you feel like a participant. I was slightly aware of the real world, the dark room, the whir of the fan blades on the ceiling. I was more aware of the dream, though. I was still lying in a bed, but now it was silent, and the air was stagnant and hot. There was a milky yellow light streaming in from the open window. The trees outside that window were still. I couldn’t get to sleep no matter how hard I tried, it had been hours already, and it would probably be hours more. It wasn’t insomnia. It was the combination of the sticky heat and the sick yellow light that kept me from drifting off to dreamland. It was the kind of weather, the kind of conditions that made your mind race as you tried to find unconsciousness.
The door opens slowly and the light clicks on. My teacher is standing there. I don’t know why I know that it’s my teacher. He stands there looking at me, gazing at my slightly stirring form. The emotion or lack thereof on his face is hard to pin down. All of his features are a blur as my eyes try to adjust to the rush of the brilliant hallway light and focus in on him. I can’t see where he came from, where he’d been, all I see around him is the light.
“Can’t sleep.” Not a question, but a statement.
“Nope.” I agree.
He comes in, and now he is holding a flashlight in one hand and a package of twizzlers in the other. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t holding them before. The wind kicks up and the rain starts almost as soon as he crosses the threshold into my room. The door closes behind him, cutting us off from that light that my eyes had just begun to trust.
I hear a rumble of thunder in the distance, not yet loud or present enough to demand my attention.
Were this a real storm I would be out walking in it. The ability to flirt with disaster yet avoid all the real danger is an exciting one, and I relish it. I know I am not the only one who walks in storms, and that is comforting too. He hands me the bag and switches off the light. The flashlight comes on a moment later and focuses on me…then the beam finds its way to his face. He is murky, and he lacks detail, but it’s okay because he isn’t real.
The lightning is crashing down now, and we’re both eating twizzlers.
It’s an absolute cacophony outside the bedroom window, and I try my best to ignore it, but I find my self slowly getting scared. My teacher isn’t talking. He sits there in the window with a twizzler in his mouth, and I see his now dark silhouette within the frame of it.
His silence is disturbing, the lightning is disturbing. I am disturbed.
I get the urge to shove him out of the window, to lean out of my bed and push, splattering him all over the pavement below. “This isn’t real” isn’t doing it for me anymore. I find myself melting into the dream, until it becomes the only thing I know. I am terrified by it, the sort of fright that comes not with vivid imagery and startling violence but in subtle simplicity and depth of description. It is the sort of horror that requires no evil.
The thunder is uproarious, it shakes the entire room. My teacher is emotionless. The bedposts creak and shower the floor with dust as they shatter. I fall, and I pray that the jolt returns me to the waking world. Inside I know it isn’t possible, so I remain. I scramble out of the rubble of my bed, my motion sluggish and pained. Still he sits there munching, regarding me with a cold lack of feeling that seems to border almost on quiet amusement. Does he enjoy my situation? Does my pain bring him joy? Is he a sadist? I settle on that thought and find it feasible. The more I look the more convinced I am that what I see in his eyes is not unflinching apathy at all, but a suppressed desire and anxiousness for more. He wants to see me get hurt, he hopes that the bed will fall apart entirely and crush me dead upon the ground.
I rush forward toward him, and I fill with anger at his evil desire. He tumbles out the window and through the air, sinking slowly as though through water. I cringe as I hear his body hit the ground, and the splatter jars me awake.
I fly up out of my real bed, panting and heaving, gasping for breath. I am drenched with sweat; I am tangled in the sheets. There is lightning, there is. The thunder is there too, slowly and steadily rolling like a line of timed percussion driving soldiers off to war. Off to death. Am I really awake, or is this just another layer of my dream? My breathing is starting to normalize, and I imagine that it is all over. I dismiss the happenings of my dream, as so many of us do, as the result of bad food and too much heat. I do this not because it is what I believe, but because it is what I find comfortable.
The window is open, it wasn’t before. At least, I thought it wasn’t, but in my state the worlds in my mind and in reality were blending and recombining at the speed of light, and my opinion was not to be trusted. There was one way to find out for sure just what level of consciousness I was on.
I mustered my strength, rose from my bed, and crept to the window.
There was no body. Or, to put it more closely to the point, there were no pulpy remains of human and twizzler haphazardly arrayed on the pavement beneath my window. I was ashamed to think that I expected it. The lightning flashed, and the report soon followed in the form of a boom of thunder. The wind picked up, the dream won’t fade. Many people say that their greatest source of frustration is a dream that retreats so quickly into the nether of the mind that one is left with not even a memory of its contents. I have forever been plagued by an abundance of such information, and the old adage about the grass being greener on the other side holds true: I would much rather have their curse than mine. I want the vividness of the dream-storm to go away and leave me in peace; I want to get back to sleep. Something in the depths of my stomach agrees with the dream, and tells me to stay awake.
I sit there in silence, thinking, for some time. Why do I let these feelings, these useless dreams, run me so completely? The lightning won’t stop. I can’t help but dwell on the fact that there was no lightning when I went to sleep. I can see that part a little more clearly now, without the haze of the dream hanging over my head. It is still there, of course, but it’s allowing me to see through it, like I’m slowly pulling off a veil.
I hear something coming down the hall. Footsteps, hurried but not running. That makes me think. I have a quick decision to make. Those useless dreams, the useless feelings they make me have…right now it feels like someone is ramming a corkscrew through my stomach, over and over. I tell myself its nothing, some kid coming in late who can’t find his room. My stomach disagrees, and I double over in pain. This sort of thing happens to me all the time, but why now? Why tonight? I wish I could just have a decent night’s sleep like a normal person. I want to pull the covers back over me, despite the heat, and drown in them until I choke myself to sleep. Unfortunately, the time for that has passed.
“Ignore it.” I whisper, “Ignore it.” But I can’t ignore it anymore than I can ignore hunger or thirst. The need to comply with my body’s demands is a primordial and undeniable one. Groggy, I grab for something heavy, I think it is a baseball bat but I can’t be sure.
The door opens, slowly. It’s my teacher. He doesn’t want to wake me…that would be bad. He sees the jumbled sheets strewn on the bed and assumes that I lie lifeless beneath them. I see his face, eager, intense.
CRACK!
Instantly I know that my decision was the right one, the tempest in my stomach subsides slowly as a new form of nausea washes over me. He lies on the ground, half in and half out of my room. His face is twisted in ambitious glee to a point where I no longer recognize him. It isn’t a box of twizzlers he carries, it’s an axe. The blade is soaked in blood, and when I see it I know that my room was not his first stop this evening.
Premonitions…everyone gets them from time to time. Sometimes they are difficult to ignore. For me, they always are. I stand above my teacher in the darkness with the bat that cracked his temple, and I notice that it is I who is now, silhouetted in the window. Startlingly, I find that it is my face so unemotionally arranged, illuminated by the lightning still flashing so brilliantly. The night is terror, and it brings with it the weight of my gift and my curse, the gift that others have but choose to ignore, to forget. The morning will come soon, and the world of my dreams will be as distant as a foreign country. I can feel it already, dawn beginning to break, the eyes of the early risers slowly creaking open. Outside, the storms are dying down.