Dreamt that my Dad was giving me a ride to school about a week before class started. He took a strange route and I ended up falling out of the car without his knowing. I found a gas station next to a nearly deserted airfield and I found an old, rusty, non-motored lawn mower (the kind I mowed the lawn with when I lived with my parents).
Between the airfield and the freeway, on a road that looked a bit like Magnolia just before the land changes from Santee into El Cajon, I pushed the reluctant mower. I was going, I realise now, in the direction of Parkway Plaza (mall).
But the rules were a little different in the world. The road and the freeway peeled apart to display different world layers. I lost myself for a time in a layer populated by soft clay people who smooshed and silently screamed when you touched them. Then there was a layer of curiously small, breakable buildings. Finally there were two infinitely large sheets of sticky black paper. Between were stuck people, arranged in groups starting with the most living on the left and the most dead on the right. When I peeled back the top sheet, the people on the left screamed for help and seemed uncomfortable with the air on their red, glossy open wounds. The people, or the shapeless slabs of meat, to the right were twisted into increasingly inhuman expressions of pain. Some people were no more than blackened, crying faces.
I left and found an apartment near Parkway Plaza that was filled with my family's furniture. I stashed the lawn mower in a corner and my Dad showed up to tell me that I'd been missing for nearly a decade.
...
When you drive through a Taco Bell and you hear echoing wobbly rumbles around you, it could mean you have a flat tire. That's what it meant for me last night, anyway. So once again, like clockwork, my car is incapacitated. And class starts next week. Guess it's back to the trolley for me...
For those interested, Caitlin's uploaded my latest four pages of Nar'eth manga to Nebari.net. Have a look.
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