Fire Maned Mare of the Night
She rode up to me with the fire of her mane billowing whipping up angry tongues of flame in her wake. Her gallop carried her up 24 stories where her transparent form melted through the concrete wall and window until she stood snorting her hot lotus breath on me. There in the darkness that her phantasmal inner fire couldn't touch, the breath curled around my sleeping form and seeped into my brain.
And I dreamed.
So seldom that she has visited me - maybe ten times in my knowing life - that I didn't recognize it at first. The faces I saw were there, the scents of home hadn't changed. I could smell the barnyard's manure, the cows from across the way, the musk of the basement rooms where my brother and I had spent our teenage and early twenties years, the tang of the soft water pumped from our well. I was back home. But it was different, too. There were more people around, more than just the frequent biker or jogger training up the road. Here, there were people in a city not unlike those of a swampy city from the satire I've been helping with.
The place had become a road paved on the bridge of Good Intentions, a place where we strived and worked, where innocence was paid for by sweat. And in the swimming pool built up in favor of we children, that sweat had been used as the chlorine in which we swam. My parents were dead. They had been taken by agents with BANK tatooed to their faces, leaving me and my brothers alone with the house, and I realized, at their funeral, that I wasn't ready for this. I lacked the skills I needed to live here. How was I to feed myself when I didn't know how to make the money needed to get that food. Even the simplest, smallest thing was priced outrageously. An apple for an hour's work? Ridiculous! I couldn't teach. I couldn't ride. I couldn't do anything except the minimum wage down the road at McDonald's, where I had to eat, as well.
I could only hold out so long. The end was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before those emotionless androids called BANK would come for what was theirs. Even after selling everything: my car, my Transformers collection, my comics, everything in the house, the pipes feeding in water, the insulation in the attic, there wasn't enough. I heard their car crunch down the gravel in the driveway. My heart was racing. Where could I go? What could I do? They clomped up onto the rotting doorstep.
Thump! a hand sounded on the door.
Thump!
Thump!
My heart pounding in my chest, I came to. Shaking, I looked about the room and stumbled to get a drink. As I poured cup after cup of water down my throat, I looked around, knowing that I wasn't alone. I had been visited. I saw something terrifying and in that, I saw the fears that I had long refused to acknowledge. I was here in Thailand, in a home I made for myself, not the wild confusing morass of life that was the USA. I was safe. But with the retreat of her fire, I'm left chilled. The Nightmare has found me. She had come to me in my sleep to remind me that no matter where I ran, no matter what I did, if I wasn't smart, her master would unleash my own personal Hell upon me. All I can do is fortify against such a seige and pray, pray, pray that my decisions would prove to be the tactics that hold his evil at bay.