Getting Black Eyes in Houston

Chapter 4 - The Ice Rink and the Dream

The first sign that it's a dream is the unnatural cold. Not even air conditioners get this cold in Texas in August. Not even movie theaters. This is the sterile cold of somewhere far from here, or a doctor's office, a morgue. Or the Galleria Ice Skating Rink. 

I'm dreaming of the little boy again. I've had this dream hundreds of times since it happened.

For a moment, I try to reason my way out of the dream. It can't be this cold. I'm in Texas. I'm not even sure I made it into the house. I might be passed out in my car, wasting gas running the AC while the heat begins to rise outside. My head is probably lolling back and I'm leaned back in a running car filled with empty beer bottles and fast food bags. Blessedly, there is no food in them to go bad because when I drink, I get hungry. But the reason does not chase away the dream, or the bitter cold. I've never traveled, so I don't know of anywhere that's cold enough to chill you like the industrial cold of an ice skating rink in the middle of Texas. 

I open my eyes. I don't know if it's normal to be able to open and close your eyes in a dream. I don't know if anything about me is normal. 

I looked away when it actually happened, but I don't look away now. The boy was probably older than me when it happened. I was six, and my mind says that the boy was probably eight. He was wearing a Flintstones shirt and a jacket, and his skates were brand new. He was terrified, but no one could see him, no one but me. His hair is blonde, but won't be for long. His brown eyes are wide with terror, fear, shock. There is even an element of disbelief that none of the people nearby are helping him, even seem to notice him. He'd probably be angry if he weren't so scared.

When it really happened, I looked away from the boy, to the monster. I don't know what kind of monster it was, even now, with considerably more knowledge of monsters, I don't know exactly what it was. It could have been some sort of displaced monster from a cold place or just something opportunistic.  

 More than the blood, more than the screaming, the part that will stick with me probably forever is the expression on the monster's face. It's the same expression people get when eating a really good hamburger. That "eyes almost closed" euphoria that fast food commercials always try but never quite succeed at emulating. 

I've read that you're not supposed to experience tactile sensations in your dreams, but I still feel that vaguely foreign sense of cold, so alien in Texas summer.

The dream feels different this time. 

I'm closer. 

Instead of being across the ice, half a football field away from the boy, I'm barely ten feet away. 

The boy looks different, too. Usually, he's just like he was when I was six, his blond hair slowly darkening from the blood that drips steaming onto the unnatural ice floor in the middle of Texas. His brown eyes were glazed with pain and denial as the monster bit off another chunk of his leg, chewed and swallowed. 

His mouth was open and screaming for the first several bites, but eventually, no sound came out. I remember the screams slowly fading to whimpers, eventually being drowned out completely by the nearby oblivious people experiencing the magic of an ice rink in the middle of Houston. 

I remember taking that deep breath that comes before I start screaming.

But this time is different. 

The hair is already dark, shoulder length where his was short. This time the screaming is higher. I didn't think it could get higher but it is. 

He's bigger. A dark part of my brain says that it'll take longer for the monster to eat him. Instead of being little kid skinny, the body the monster snacks on is chubby, heavy, but the monster still has no trouble holding it aloft with a single hand. 

I look closer at the tangle of the longer hair, through the sticky blood dripping from the dangling strands. Why is this different? What has changed? 

I see the face of the person dangling from the monster's fist, one leg almost gone, the other barely missing a foot, blood no longer spurting but oozing weakly. I see the face whimpering in horror and pain and fear.

It's my face.