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Dreams and Nightmares 44/page 15

 

 

STONY ELF

 

 

The house had grown bigger overnight.

Waking up from dreams, one usually needed to spend at least a few mental somersaults to acclimatise the self to reality. However, it was not long before the dreams were accepted – simply for what they were:

dreams.

Tony woke from a dream which seemed like his real life and into a real life which seemed like his dream. Disorientated, he lifted the covers to look at his naked body. But it still seemed trapped in the dream. His wife had left a crumpled dent beside him. She was evidently stepping somewhere in a distant wing of the terraced house, by the sound of it.

He tried to recall the whereabouts of the bathroom. The noise of rain on the window reminded him that the summer had been one long drought until now. He remembered the droplets racing down the ancient panes of childhood windows. But that seemed like a memory of someone who owned a self other than Tony’s self. The past was not a foreign country but an alternate world.

These thoughts were untypical. He doubted his own identity even more than his sanity.. until he recognised his wife for what she really was, as she scorched in with a cold poker filched from the companion-set in the main living-room.

He got up, knowing in his heart of hearts that all scullery maids possessing himself as her self should have been hard at work long ago or else earn more ugly red welts on the stone-cold end of her elfin body.