dream.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
The water put out his cigarette.
There was a leak in the ceiling. He hadn't noticed it before, which was odd because when he raised his head to look at the source, there was a great gaping hole where the roof had collapsed. Of course. The roof had collapsed years ago. He felt he had known that before but the memory of it simply escaped him.
He assumed that dripping meant it would be raining but the sky above was clear. From where he sat perched upon a school desk under the open sky, he would of course had been drenched if it was raining. Instead he was bathed in pale moonlight.
In the place of the moon, however, there hovered a giant glowing crab. "Aloha," the crab said to him in a smooth, detached female voice. Her claws clacked with a sound that reminded him vaguely of staplers punching.
"I think there's been a mistake, princess," he said to the moon-crab, but even as the words left his mouth, he could feel himself getting lighter. Weightless. "Wait, weight," he called out, waving his hand at her. "That's mine, I don't need you to--"
Someone pushed him from behind. Now that he weighed nothing, he went flying off the desk and tumbled head-over-feet into the air. He thought he was falling up, then suddenly he was falling down.
He landed in an empty lot overgrown with weeds, surrounded by a chainlink fence. He had the disorienting sensation that if he tried to stand, he would float up into the sky and never find his way down, so he remained lying on the broken pavement. After what might have been a minute or an hour, he heard a creaking sound like a bicycle approaching slowly.
When he looked over, his brother had already crossed the fence. Perhaps he'd climbed over, or slipped between some gap. How he knew this boy was his brother, he wasn't sure. Maybe they weren't even brothers. It was only a feeling he had, that his little brother had come here on his bicycle and hopped the fence. His mouth started to form his brother's name.
He choked on the first syllable. Stuttered. There was a fire in his throat like it had been slit. Glowing yellow eyes filled his vision. It was her. His blood was spilling from her lips, dripping down her chin drip drip drip and he thought briefly he knew this was coming and he shouldn't have kept her but he thought--
Then it all faded.