Ten Nights' Dreams
(after Natsume Soseki)

7. B. Head

A rough hand fists your hair and your head metronomes like a watch on a hypnotist’s
fob. Your body an inert carrot abandoned on the cutting board. Crowd throbbing below,
their shouts stretch like slow taffy, frizz of effervescent sparks behind your eyes. The
bobble-headed, doll-like faces fade.


8. Book ‘Em, Danno

Late for the airport. Panicked frantic packing of nonsequiturs, as if you’re a refugee
fleeing the fall of your own unconscious: A lidless jar full of sea monkeys covered with
Saran Wrap and a rubber band, a protractor, art glass dildo, shoebox full of ball point
pen springs, a spatula you intend on using as a passport.

Madcap scramble down the highway which soon turns into gravel road, which soon
turns into a winding mountain pass, which suddenly runs out altogether. Rushing
water everywhere. Steep drop-offs. Clearly, you’re lost, but you’re late, so you
keep driving. Rushing rapids smoothes out into airport runway, and you race
toward the soon-departing plane, old school movie style—burnt rubber, squealing
brakes—startling a cluster of nuns waiting at the bottom of the opened staircase.
You step out of the car into the black swarm.

Cue the theme song to Hawaii Five-O. The nuns stop their ant-like milling and
dance a snazzy twist. Slow-mo, the staircase to the plane serenely lifts and retracts.
You see now that the plane is not a plane, but a departing space-ship.

Heartbroken, you run toward the disappearing stairs, waving your arms in the bright
hot circle of light. Wait! you cry out. Your tears are real. Take me with you!