In the closet there is a pull down ladder with access to the attic. I flip the light switch on and head up. I see the problem immediately. It’s like a maelstrom in the attic; there are sections of roof pulling off, flapping in the wind violently. I have a bright idea about how to fix the issue that fails miserably. I decide it’s time to get Dad’s help.

Apparently, my parent’s house connects to mine through the basement which is accessed through the attic. Crawling my way through the attic like a simian, I make my way downward through some ducting and enter the basement where I can clearly see my Dad. He’s working on some sort of basement kitchen remodel, everything is white, covered in dust and sheets of translucent plastic. He’s sweating and breathing heavily, swinging a sledge hammer which, incredibly, builds cabinets instead of breaks them down.

I tell him of my predicament and he agrees to help. We head on up to his attic, which accesses my attic (why wouldn’t it?) with a few rolls of black plastic and some tools in our hands. His attic is fully finished. There is fine hardwood installed over the joists following the angles of the vaulted ceilings beneath. There’s a chandelier, antique lamps and side tables, a dinette set; a very ostentatious attic indeed. But on the way to my attic, we are stopped in our tracks by a sudden quake. The rain stops.

The concussive sounds from afar are coming at regular intervals, about ten seconds apart. Every “boom” is followed by a tremor. It sends the chandelier swinging and knocks over a few lamps. Dad has no clue what’s going on and neither do I, until I peak out of the window. I see them from far away beyond the corn fields that sprawl out over the landscape. One is bright green, the other bright purple and they are rhythmically gnashing their way through the countryside just like the way Hungry Hungry Hippos would rise up to reach for marbles, slam down, and then pull back their bounty as you frenetically mashed their levers over and over again. Unlike Hungry Hungry Hippos, they are here to destroy. Shaped like enormous convex-domed, anime inspired, plastic children’s toys, they are the size of an NFL stadium and their purpose is to purge the land of people. Yes, people, us, the human race. They are “The Munchers.”

The munchers are guided by their scout crew of tiny plastic robots with tiny plastic tabs on their backs. They are an assorted lot, resembling many kinds of small Transformer like toys, about eight inches tall. They run far ahead of the munchers and crawl up, around, and in any structure with their claws and wheels they can searching for people. When they find a human, they sound a high pitched alarm that signals more scouts to investigate the area. They then relay their information to the munchers to direct their path of annihilation. They are attracted by light.

We are introduced to the scouts by drilling sounds in the attic. One red scout has let himself in to our attic by boring a hole through the roof with his drill-bit-hands. I immediately know that this tiny robot can’t be any good and scoop Mr. Drill-Bit up. He tries to drill through my hands so I smash him on the floor, noticing the odd tab on its back as I do so. He starts to sound a squealing, almost dog whistle pitched alarm. This is bad. Two more enter through the hole.

In a panic, I rip the tab off of his back and, thankfully, he deactivates in a cloud of smoke and sparks. His little beady eyes go dim. The two other scouts are ricocheting around the attic haphazardly searching for light sources and beginning to sound alarms. I cut them off, pull their tabs and tell Dad to cut the lights. With all the lights off and the scouts a sizzling pile of deactivated plastic, we crawl to the window in the dark and observe.

The munchers have made it halfway across the horizon and into the neighborhood. From our vantage point atop a tall hill, we can see the swath of smoldering earth the munchers have left in their wake. Boom…… boom….. boom…. Their pace is methodical, destroying without conscience, sending shock waves from miles away, inspiring cold sweats into every human who feels the intense vibrations. We crouch down in the attic in the black of night and pray that we will not meet the same fate as those in the scorched earth left by the munchers did; crushed to death, mangled in the dirt. They will be here soon.

He is surrounded by three or four puny little drunk frat boys trying their damnedest to hoist this Jeep upon his willing chin. I watch them struggle for a bit and then decide to help. As I’m slowly walking my way towards the fray, I hear the DJ at the nearby bar announce my appearance to the Jeep-chin-balancing act. He proclaims the enormousness of, well, me in general. I’m flattered. I look to my sides and my arms have more than doubled in size. I’m ready for this shit.

I promptly plop the Jeep upon his chin and he balances that heap, by God; I’m impressed. Chris and another group of friends wave goodbye and head off to bet on sports games in front of the seemingly hundreds of large TVs smothering the rear wall. I’m left alone by the bar, my arms have deflated back to normal. I hear a baby cry. A sweet looking little blond girl. Her hair is bright yellow and shiny, twisted into cylindrical curls. She’s probably just shy of a year old, still in diapers. Suddenly it’s a ghost town in the hotel and it’s just me and the baby, Ioki.

I learned her name telepathically, she never actually speaks. We walk into a room to the side to get away from the main casino floor. It’s quiet and there are tables and chairs stacked up near the right wall. It smells musty like a crawlspace. There’s a TV on the wall and I turn it on to break the silence. I sprawl out on a couple of chairs positioned side-by-side to allow me to put my feet up. I drift off to sleep with baby Ioki in my lap.

I am rudely awakened by a foul stench and a wet feeling in my lap. Ioki took a huge, rank, liquid shit all over me. I look around and I’m covered in this viscous, molasses colored diarrhea. I decide that we need to get cleaned up. Ioki is no longer a cute little blond girl. She more resembles some sort of mutant baby like the one from Eraserhead. She’s mostly motionless, has no hair and no clothing; just a bursting-with-shit diaper. I respect my charge as keeper of Ioki and decide that we need a shower.

We walk through the corridor to the rear into another room, much like the last, but with an awkwardly positioned luxury shower to my immediate right. How convenient. I begin to remove the diaper from Ioki as she hangs limply in my arms. There’s still dripping molasses excrement all over my forearms. I pry off the diaper like an old band-aid from her bottom and notice that from roughly the belly button down, she’s covered in dense fur. We enter the shower and get cleaned up nicely. The room has opened up since we entered the shower and the color pallet has shifted from deep red to bright blue.

We are now inside of some random family’s mansion and proceed to meander aimlessly through a never ending series of rooms until we reach an enormous great room. Ioki has her pretty blond curls back. And apparently, Ioki has her family back too as she jumps from my arms, now able to walk (and jump and run), and scurries off to her family waiting conveniently for her by their plush blue sectional. I try to make eye contact with the family without success. I am nothing but a shadow to them. I inspect some additional rooms of the house in wonderment and then wake up.

The cucumber popsicle girl
had long sinewy legs
that cut through the winds
like dolphin fins
her brown hair she liked to twirl

Weird…

I yell for the dog and she comes to me. We run downstairs for shelter underneath the landing that leads down into the garage. I throw the lawnmower, throw the blower, throw every piece of junk I have stashed under there out into the garage and yank the mutt under with me. The walls of the house vibrate and groan deeply as the tornado cuts into the structure. I hear all kinds of cacophony for a brief minute or two and then everything just stops. It’s over.

I release my kung-fu grip on the pup and walk outside; the garage door is now conveniently open for us. It’s sunny now, the rain has stopped; only a swath of light gray remains in the sky. My roof is torn to hell and back, it basically doesn’t exist anymore. I no longer have a car. Evidently I still drive the 90′ LeBaron I had back in high school because there it is, parked in the driveway with a tree on it. Nice.

I’m then magically teleported to a most appealing car rental establishment in the midst of a random ghetto where I’m trying my damnedest to find some kind of wiring harness to go with the car I have just rented. It’s  a beaut of a car: 70′s era Crown Vic, pearl white finish, white wall tires, plush velvety purple interior. No dice on the mirror though. I was kind of disappointed by that. Its best feature was the remote control that unlocked the doors. A simple unlock button was not good enough for this rig, no, it had a full on joystick control instead. Up for the hood, down for the trunk, left for the driver’s side door, right for the passenger’s. I toyed with this contraption for a minute, pondered what the hell I was doing, and then woke up.

It pops up again. All my icons are gone from the desktop. The start menu disappears. But there is that goddamn banner again. It seems that I have a virus. And the virus is trying to force me to buy the cure for itself. A virus with a conscience. He knows he’s an asshole and he wants to get better, so he’s showing me the way. The “way” costs $29.99 coincidentally.

It becomes clear that this virus was made by the antivirus software company to get people to buy the cure for the virus they’ve given you. A clever marketing plot. I’m an elite hacker right? At least my grandmother seems to think so. I can fix most networking problems by hacking routers. And by hacking I mean unplugging them and then plugging them back in. Elite. I try to fix the problem to no avail. Screw it, I’m going  outside.

It’s a dreary day in the neighborhood. Small white houses with side-yard moats line the street. The clouds are a dark ominous gray and are moving fast. The wind is whipping all of the huge oak tree limbs around. It’s the kind of weather I hate – it looks like it’s going to rain, but it wont, the clouds just wont come together right. An ice cream truck shows up. It is a filthy white truck that bears the logo of that same damn antivirus company that has been hounding me. No ice cream man jingles accompany the arrival of this truck.

Two men get out of the truck dressed in filthy white jumpsuits. They both have black hats and long greasy hair. One is a fat, black haired man with thick framed glasses. The other is a slim fair man with his faced hidden by an unkempt beard. They proceed to the back of the truck where they open a hatch and wrangle out a slimy dark green sea creature and slip it into my moat. It is some sort of large eel, about eight feet long with huge triangular teeth. It seems to enjoy the environment. The cool, muddy water pleases it.

After watching the little eel muck around in my muck for a short while, the upstanding gentlemen released a much larger, much more “teethy” sea creature into the moat. I get it now. they are illustrating a big bad virus attack on my poor little unprotected eel computer. This mega eel violently rips apart the little one in massive splashy thrashes. What a way to sell an antivirus program. Jeez.

It was Jessica, lying on a wooden board that rolls back and forth, I’m staring down at her face. Her eyes are closed.  She’s younger, maybe five or six years younger. She has a beautiful smile on her face, it’s as if she is sun bathing with a warm orange glow on her freckled cheeks. Her fine brown hair hangs across the board and falls downward.

I realize at this point that she has no idea who I am. We’re meeting again for the first time when she opens her eyes and says hello. At this point, everything we’ve had together, everything we’ve done together only exists in my mind. I look down past her face, past the rolling board she’s laying on and see that what it rolls in to. It is a huge furnace.  It is a crematorium. She’s clearly still alive and happy. But “we” are dead.

I started crying and woke up crying. I went to my phone and saw a text message. It’s a grocery list from my wife. She’s fine and wants steak for dinner. That makes me feel better.

It flickered like a strobe light for a few seconds before it dimly illuminated a dank, Saw like bathroom that extended many feet past where my bedroom should have ended. There was a putrid toilet, stained brown, in the corner. Nasty, dirty, dark gray tile all over the walls and floor. There were some strange heavy iron chains hanging from the ceiling  opposite of the toilet. Right in the middle was a pedestal sink, cracked and filthy. Above it was the remnants of a shattered mirror.

I always wanted my own bathroom. I tried to get up but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. Not just dream paralyzed, I was conscious that I was dreaming, but I couldn’t wake up or move. At one point I swear I actually opened my eyes and looked out my actual window to the left, but my body would not move. It was as if I slept on all of my limbs wrong at the same time.

After what seemed like forever, I jolted awake. It was only eight or nine at night. I walked down the hall to use our actual bathroom. It also had a nasty pedestal sink and was covered in tile from floor to walls. Pink tile. Not as intimidating.

It  was just me and my uncomfortable “big boy” twin bed with these simultaneously awful and quizzical bed sheets. They had the alphabet on them. All the letters were represented in alphabetical order, of course. They were scratchy; made of some strange nylon/cotton/steel wool blend that was neither warm nor soft. But none of that really mattered. What mattered was that each letter was a monster. As in sharp teeth, crazy eyes and wild hair. I remember “M” was excessively hairy, like It from the Addam’s Family. “T” was pretty ferocious looking with his sharp fangs. “L” was probably lacking a monster chromosome, cockeyed with his long gooey tongue dragging on the ground. It was these sheets that I’m sure provided me with the magic to fly.

It would always begin the same. I would lay down for bed, not really tired. The room would be dark sans the warm orange diffused glow of the street lamp through my window. I had trouble sleeping even in those days. I would lay there, force myself to close my eyes and think about this dream. Then, after a little while, it would happen if I was lucky.

My body, flat on my bed, felt like it was floating on water. A sensation not unlike that of having had one too many drinks and seeing the room spin, but without the nausea.  The walls and ceiling surrounding me would dissolve. Nothing but the black of night and the stars existed in my field of view.  I could feel it from under the bed. A thrust, a propulsion towards the empty sky. We (the alphabet monsters and I) would rise, first slowly, then quickly upwards. The bed would shift and tilt, providing me with glorious little aerial peeks of Chandler, AZ at night.

I could feel the wind, feel the gravity on my body as I was magically piloted through the sky. I could see the strings of Christmas lights dotting the miniature city of ants below. The saguaro cacti looked like caricatures of themselves, lit by the moonlight from above. This dream was fun, never frightening.

I never remember the landing. I would fly around for an undetermined amount of time and then invariably wake up the next morning to sunshine, Trix and cartoons. My pillow would probably be on the floor. My sheets were in a ball by my legs. I loved this dream.