Oneiric - a short story
I’ve been working on a short story over the past week. Right now, the plot is very much a series of wild stabs in the dark. Still, I am rather satisfied with what has come about thus far. Give it a read and, if you have the time, tell me what you think. I am always looking for constructive critique.
Oneiric
By: Theena Kumaragurunathan 2005As daylight waltzed away, night swung in, and silence drowned out the last decibel of sound, I woke up to the sounds of my own screaming. High notes of anguish. My dreams transformed me into a tenor of woe.
The mirror in front of my bed reflected my weary sweat-soaked face, and the smiling moon outside the window. Full moon.
Elsewhere in the city, religious festivals were probably underway to mark Vesak. Here, yours truly began another nocturnal day of looking over my shoulder, shouting at imaginary beings in my room before proceeding to have a conversation with them about the weather, the state of the nation and me.
Right now, as I write this aimless piece on my current state of relative peace, dear reader, I find myself asking if this act is in itself a dream. I did the usual things: I pinched myself and I felt the light stimulus on the skin - check; I felt the familiar tension on the keyboard as I typed away into the night - check; the low sounds of the Colombo night were audible and, more importantly, ordinary - check.
I passed my self-designed-self-administered-sanity test.
I opened the music program and chose not to meddle with it as it went about choosing the soundtrack for my life. For my now. It chose Mozart’s Requiem before swinging into the sixties and the Beatles. Paul McCartney told me to take a sad song and make it better.
My room is a cube. It couldn’t get more cube-y than this. If it did, then I am probably locked away in a lunatic asylum. Lunatic asylums are painted white to symbolize a fresh start for all their patients, no matter what shades they had used to paint their past. My room is painted white too; I have no use for colours. White in my room symbolizes plainness – like vast areas of void, of nothingness – like the Polar Caps - where the most mundane of objects, like a polar bear’s carcass, when sighted, is cause for celebration.
Like my head.
Or my heart.
And my face.There is a carcass there in all three; I just have to find it.
Six hours have passed since I woke up. Six hours and I’ve written three hundred words that can, at best, be classed as a stream of consciousness. Six hours and I feel the need to go back to bed and close my eyes. And when that happens, perhaps I’ll dream. Perhaps all this was a dream instead and I’ll actually wake up.
Someone, I can’t recall who, said that the one thing that made society’s successful so successful, and society’s dogpile so dogpilish, is the ability of the former to separate dreams from reality. Guess I am fucked then.
I closed my eyes and woke up to the sounds of the world of medicine. Doctors, nurses, beeping sounds and people I didn’t recognize – probably relatives, I’ll be bonding with in the coming days – stood around me and stared.
The doctors and their medical school certified faces of compassion. My ‘relatives’ faces and their need for normality. That – normality – is when a loved one is either dead or alive. When you are caught in the grey area of life and death, like I am, you become a freak.
A freak - check.
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The crash had left the car mangled beyond recognition. It was a Honda Civic, the 1998 model, built by a Japanese car company bent on providing cars that took away the X in sexy while adding more Fs to efficient. In front of the car, lay a body - a woman - dead, he could tell even from this distance. The gaping hole on the windshield indicated that she had been in the passenger’s side only a minute before. The airbag had probably saved the life of the driver, but he wasn’t sure.
