Kmaesquire Stories

Some nights the unconscious doesn't speak in symbols. Sometimes it builds an entire economy and drops you inside it. A convention. A booth. Mushroom starts and hand-blown glass arranged like an offering - *here is the transformation, here is the vessel.* A temptation that arrived twice in the same night and had to be declined twice. A jail that had all the walls of confinement and none of the feeling. A woman at a threshold who said *oh my God* after he walked away. A friend at a festival. A car to sell. A phone call that ended in a week from Monday. And then a bike. Under his own power. Going somewhere. THE BOOTH, THE GLASS, AND THE JAIL THAT DIDN'T FEEL LIKE ONE is the fourth installment in the JREAMS series - raw, first-person dream transcriptions rendered as literary narrative. No interpretation softened. No detail omitted. The unconscious mind, unedited, given the sentence structures it deserves. *It was a dumb dream.* *Or it was the most honest one yet.* *Both is probably right.*

It was my birthday. I was VIP on a military cruiser headed to Russia - and I still couldn't get a cup of coffee. A dream set aboard an amphibious destroyer that was also, somehow, an RV, sitting on top of a carrier that nobody mentioned. The narrator wanders through passenger corridors and staff quarters, photographs a post-Cold War McDonald's for a friend whose visa just cleared, gets his drink order swallowed by a language gap, shakes hands with men in yellow vests who recognize him without words, and gets invited to Paris by two women he barely knew in waking life - only to find he can't afford the crossing and his mother can't cover it. By the time he climbs to the rooftop to ask how far they've traveled, the answer is: nowhere. San Francisco Bay. The skyline lit up like a carnival the whole time. The ship hadn't left yet. Somehow that felt like enough.

A man orders four bounce houses for his own birthday and never jumps on any of them. The siblings play on them all day. He watches from windows he installed himself - the kitchen window, the front yard, the peephole in the front door where he catches the tail end of something happening on the street that he wasn't part of. A childhood crush hanging laundry in the foreground. A daredevil behind a fence running tricks for a camera nobody asked him to set up. A neighbor in a tree mansion who asks for hash twice and gets it once. In between: a condo upstairs, a family that is his in every way that counts, chocolate-covered frozen bananas in the back of the cupboard, a phone call to arrange the pickup of bounce houses nobody over twelve touched. And twice - once near the beginning and once at the end - a small truck going up a mountain with his mom in the passenger seat and Patsy Cline on the radio. He was singing. Not well. But he was singing. ~~~ JREAMS - Episode VI K.M. Æsquire

A maple tree on a residential street is shedding leaves that negotiate their own descent - and someone has already decided they're worth five dollars each. The narrator and Kevin work the system with bent lacrosse heads and torn butterfly nets, intercepting value out of thin air, until a boy on rollerblades rolls in and everything starts changing state without warning. What follows isn't escalation. It's a parking lot, a hotel with its lights on, and two men who shouldn't be moving in the same direction coming through the same door - Fat Andy the Juggalo and Yellow, aligned for the first time in any version of reality either of them inhabits. "Come collect your friend." They're talking about Kevin. The dream declines to finish the sentence.

A man builds a motorcycle out of a tent in his grandfather's ghost town while something hunts through the buildings and a crowd learns everything by watching. He almost makes it out. He stops to use the bathroom. The bike is gone when he comes back. Someone offers him his own vape. The key and the title are still in his watch pocket because he put them there before anyone knew to look. What follows is a high school quad in Santa Rosa, a thousand small obstructions, a tunnel beneath the town, a dangerous road, and highway patrol running parallel to an escape that may or may not be completed.