SNATCH OF VOICES: THE DREAM

Autofocus. Autofocus. Autofocus! Now!

I opened my eyes with some effort. They were gummy and dry. The sleeping pills that I'd taken the night before had not had the desired effect. Sure, they'd knocked me out, physically--I felt like I had gone 10 rounds with Tornado Pete--but that damned dream had returned. If anything, the pills had made it worse, more vivid.

It had been the same dream: Walking corpses, skeletal trees, malignant black skies, yawning abysses, hellfire...the usual nightmare fare. Again, in the dream, it had been as if I were the only human being left on the planet. Alive, that is. The one human being alive. The rest had been eaten, torn asunder, swallowed, regurgitated. They'd tried to talk to me--perhaps to warn me?--but their mouths had been sewn shut and their eyes had been cauterized. Flailing they'd walked, turning only in my direction through their sense of smell...or feel.

I lay in my bed, my sheets tangled at my feet, and I panted back to regular respiration, the sweat icy on my chest. Lobo slept soundly, kicking his paws at his dream-rabbits and softly snuffling barks. I envied him, the bastard. It was 5:27 in the morning; there would be no more sleep for me.

***

It was one of those days in southeastern Michigan in which it seemed as if Mother Nature had forgotten her pills. Her schizophrenia was dialed up a notch, it seemed. There's a saying that the old-timers like to say, as if they were the one to coin the phrase: "Don't like the weather in Michigan? Wait five minutes." Funny, huh? My knees hurt from hearing it so many times. But, in this case, the saying fit the weather to a T.

Six inches of snow had been dumped in the region earlier in the week....