Unimagined

 
    Unfortunate ladies in the sky sprouting metal wings that cut clouds into tiny, bite-size pieces which you might taste like marshmallows drifting down your gullet, finding their way between your ribs as one might the rafters of an old unused attic, there to bloom forever as spiritual second and third hearts that keep you forever dreaming, forever light and airy and asleep, and wishing for something else so hard that you drift between cities and countries searching for it.
    This was I suppose how you became who you are, an event that took place before the advent of conscious thought, reinforced over time by your deep dives into this or that universe, the realms of countless other dreamers expressed on pages and screens and through sound waves. You listened and read and watched and then saw your room lift itself off the ground and grow legs and run you down the street, straight through a plate glass mirror beyond which were realms unimagined by the unimaginative.
    And so you lurk now in the places between these realms, peering in, dipping your toes in, wading up to the waist, but always leaving to stand outside watching from Elsewhere. Elsewhere, where the rainbows glow and the nights are as deep as the ocean. Elsewhere, where sheep bounce over the meadows hunting wolves, and candy is poisonous and mushrooms taste like candy. Elsewhere, where a loaded gun is always handy but never necessary.
    Your name is Gherritt. You stand beyond the mirrors in your sleep. Lifting weightless weights, planning, plotting, waiting for the day you might wake and cease to be Gherritt, to become someone else.
    The city is a series of sewers. Sew enough buildings together and what you have is one big burrow, housing all that is human in its spiritless halls, where sewage flows ever downward, but is ever produced anew. You are somewhere in this endless building, still sleeping beyond the mirror.
    You have a six-legged cow named Bertha. You keep a box of mints in your pocket, something that you think of as mints because they taste nice, but they also make your brain explode with every bite.
    Over the hills, grasses wave as tall as treetops hiding gods.
    I fiddle with dials on your bed, keeping you alive and kicking. You kick aginst the mirrors, but they are made of material harder than stone.

    The sensation of floating is real. This is your actual physical state. What is not real is your sense of control over it. The sense of floating where you like rather than in one specific spot.
    Beyond the stone mirrors there is only glass, if you could just reach beyond them with the ball of your foot and shatter it, the dreams might flow out into a putrid puddle on the floor and leave you there gasping air and feeling for the gun that was always handy, but is now absent and necessary. You do these things and then there are shouts in the hallway. through the blur in your eyes, you see that the hills do not exist, there is only the corridor. You have arrived in one specific place at last and no longer have the ability to leave and go elsewhere. Perhaps you are awake, and perhaps you are just having a nightmare, one that you cannot immediately exit from.
    Outside this room is a train station in the dead of night, a switchyard enclosed in a series of tunnels, darkness out beyond the platforms twitching with unease, uncomfortably aware of its own endlessness. Cold breath drifts in out of the nothingness, drying out your skin so that it feels too tight. You flex your fingers expecting your knuckles to split open like sausage casings.
    Somewhere in this building is a city, but for now it is only the station and the sewers, bereft of any life except for the uniformed men who search for you with their flashlights cutting the dark of the many outcrops and unused gantries of this place.
    You reach into your pocket and find something round and squishy, studded with probosci. When you squeeze it, it squeaks like a chew toy. The noise attracts the flashlights and so you place it back in your pocket and huddle, draw the darkness around you until the lights go away. The shouting voices fade with them, and then you are alone, far from the rainbows and the sheep, alone with your squeaky toy and the clothes you are wearing, which you have never seen before but must belong to you.