An Unsettling Dream
I have arrived in a strange, isolated town; the town is in the midst of some story, as if it were the fiction of a film; now, the apartment of a family of four; it is empty, and the children have gone missing; all that remains are the recording of the little girl's voice as she repeats a rhyme; the parents, grieved of their loss, have run an endless loop of the words through a loudspeaker hidden in a vent, but the sound is tinny and ghost-like; the father, now: he is impatient, lost in himself.
Something is happening in the town, something powerful and unknown; the people are disappearing; the national guard is called, and they launch a strange, burning chain reaction in the air over the people's heads; they explain that it is only a preventative for something airborne and mostly harmless, but that is not the truth; something else is going on, beyond air and fire, from another world; among the crowd milling through the grey streets now are the parents; they argue; the mother is sharp and angry, the father is aloof and resentful.
Now flash backwards to the girl as she speaks her rhyme into the microphone, and it is the parents that have strangely vanished, not merely missing but gone from the world; over and over she repeats the words while the little one sits and watches; over and over.
Flash backwards again, to the parents, on a huge futuristic train, in a holiday moment high above the town; they drink champagne on the balcony, and it is all a moving picture shown on magic paper, and in the picture the father takes the paper out of its envelope so that he can see the picture on the paper of him with the picture on the paper into infinity, but the paper is blank; "I guess it doesn't work that way." They laugh.
Now, I am with the detectives who try to understand what is happening and why the people are disappearing; they have taken tiny frozen bodies from the water and have put them in a small plastic tub; I pick one up, covered in ice, stiff as wood, doll-like, no longer than a pencil; it is the father; I try to rub the ice away from the features of the face. The detective says: "what would cause a man to become fozen and tiny?"
Something is happening in the town, something powerful and unknown; the people are disappearing; the national guard is called, and they launch a strange, burning chain reaction in the air over the people's heads; they explain that it is only a preventative for something airborne and mostly harmless, but that is not the truth; something else is going on, beyond air and fire, from another world; among the crowd milling through the grey streets now are the parents; they argue; the mother is sharp and angry, the father is aloof and resentful.
Now flash backwards to the girl as she speaks her rhyme into the microphone, and it is the parents that have strangely vanished, not merely missing but gone from the world; over and over she repeats the words while the little one sits and watches; over and over.
Flash backwards again, to the parents, on a huge futuristic train, in a holiday moment high above the town; they drink champagne on the balcony, and it is all a moving picture shown on magic paper, and in the picture the father takes the paper out of its envelope so that he can see the picture on the paper of him with the picture on the paper into infinity, but the paper is blank; "I guess it doesn't work that way." They laugh.
Now, I am with the detectives who try to understand what is happening and why the people are disappearing; they have taken tiny frozen bodies from the water and have put them in a small plastic tub; I pick one up, covered in ice, stiff as wood, doll-like, no longer than a pencil; it is the father; I try to rub the ice away from the features of the face. The detective says: "what would cause a man to become fozen and tiny?"
posted by Joe Gola at 3:56 PM
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