Waking from the dream; like some kind of nascent flan, I almost feel myself jiggle back into halfcocked normalcy. My eyes are uncomfortable, too big for my skull and my thoughts are reeling in the mire of half-aware cognition.
'Shit,' is my first conscious thought and frankly, why shouldn't it be? Preparing myself emotionally, I trade the eigengrau wastes of my vision for the stabbing pain of my bedroom, regretting the very act of opening my eyes. 'Shit,' I repeat, my earlier thought, now twice 'shitted,' and already pissed for having awoke at all.
My bedroom is a small box full of other boxes such as my desk, my bed, the entertainment stand that holds my laptop, my reading lamp, my television and even a single chair which is currently occupied by Miss May, my fat, striped, tabby cat. The walls are painted a warm brown color, offset with bright white trim. A window looks out over the city below, or it would if I ever drew my curtains; which, is for the fucking birds really.
As far as I can tell, this room has not changed since last night. Which means that nothing about me has changed either, except perhaps for how much my headache has grown. It's just another day in my life and one more thing to be fucked up by my new powers.
'New powers?' I consider, attempting to index the bubbling soup of my brain. I'm disillusioned of my bed by now, and so I shrug out of a blanket and force myself to swing my legs over the edge. Last night—I was plastered, and today? Today I want to die. Unfortunately, the state of 'hungover,' no matter how cankerous a malady, is generally considered to be a non-fatal, temporary infirmity at worse. My stomach riles at the movement as I lurch into a sitting position.
Miss May stretches out and yawns, proudly displaying her predator's heritage: a maw full of fangs and teeth. 'Good kitty,' I think as I cradle my head, propping my elbows on my knees over the side of the bed.
'New powers?' I think again, then I realize from where the idiot thought stems. It's an intrusion upon reality from my egregious dream last night. The details swirl into nothing; my mental soup isn't alphabet after all (maybe ice-cream), but I recall strange things. 'Seven names of silence,' and 'third technique of growing,' and something about a chorus of all the birds in the galaxy blabbing on about how awful cats all are.
The malaise of my sleep-wracked mind starts to slowly lift as I feel myself shaking into the proper reality of my waking body which, in turn, loudly celebrates this arrival with a cacophony of aches and pains. The room is dim. It smells like lasagna. Possibly from the microwave lasagna I forgot about last night. In the microwave.
'Oh well,' I think. 'It'll be an alright breakfast.'
* * *
With my fork, my chair, and my cat (in my lap), I sat in the dim glow of my laptop, listening to music. I go over the details of my dream last night and realize that I can still recollect a vast amount of information. Too much for a dream certainly, but miraculously, it felt like a wealth of information greater than that gleaned by my entire collegiate career. It was by my third forkful of the cold pasta layer-cake that I could recall all seven names of silence and the methods of the third way of growing.
Somehow, my mind encapsulated these things for me. I couldn't make sense of how to legitimately put 'the third technique of growing' into action in the real world using logical means, but I knew about it, what it was, and... I think that I might be able to accomplish it, somehow, but the process still eludes me.
These are hardly all of the things and techniques on which my dream bequeathed me. I knew now, for instance, that a dragon's face had thirty-eight facets like a broken diamond, that darkness is a notorious gossip, and that I had been given a gift and that the gift was a talent for which there is no word. As I digested the implications of this knowledge, I realized that I should have felt different when I woke up. But I didn't. So, maybe it wasn't a gift. Maybe it was just my imagination.
"Hey," I say aloud, "I've got a gift."
Miss May twitches in my lap, and I stroke her fur.
"I can..." I think audibly, trying to translate dream logic majesty into a mundanity that would cooperate with this limited world, "Uh... make you, uh, a salmon dinner. Would you like that?"
She looks at me, unimpressed. Then she leaps off my lap and stalks towards the open doorway, to the hall. I watch her leave, and then I shut my laptop.
The only sounds in the apartment are those made by my own two feet as they walk me to the kitchen, and my own thoughts as I try to sort out the meanings of everything that happened in my dream last night.
* * *
In the kitchen, I open a can of tuna fish and stare at it blankly. 'It smells fishy,' I think to myself, smirking at my own wit. Though, despite my puerile wordplay, I'm not feeling particularly clever since I'm not presently at work. Where I should be. I haven't even called in.
Instead, here I am, considering the rainbow hues of tuna curls.
'It smells fishy,' I repeat, humorless.
I pry one of the small, oily flakes out of their confines and look at it.
"Miss May?" I call, looking around the floor.
My voice echoes through the empty apartment.
"Twtwtwtw," I chirp in that way that draws cats. "Food time!"
A moment later, I hear the soft sound of claws on tile. Miss May comes padding in from the hallway, a bit of dry food on the corner of her mouth. She laps at it before hopping up on the counter next to me, and taking prized interest in my can of tuna. She looks up at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to give her permission to eat.
I shake my head at her, "No, not yet," I say, still holding that one oily flake. "I think," I hesitate.
"I think I can do better."
With maybe too much flourish I throw the flake of tuna toward the tile floor. It makes a wet slap, far too loud for the small amount of fish with which I held.
Miss May leaps for cover, off of the counter and around a corner, frightened by the noise and the suddenness of everything.
As for myself, I'm clinging to the counter in fear. Fear of myself and what I'd done, for I'm now staring down at the large, flopping salmon on my kitchen floor. A salmon that I made come into existence at all. A salmon that I made from a flake of tuna. Wasn't even a big flake.
The salmon gasps for breath, its hooked jaws clamping uselessly while it flops desperately. Its glazed-over eyes stare into the void as it struggles in a futile attempt to wriggle to the wet salvation of its underwater living.
"Shit!" I call out as the fish continues to writhe.
* * *
The salmon barely moves in the bath and I wonder if it's dead. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. It's just floating there.
'Maybe it's a metaphor for life?' I consider, sitting on my toilet lid, watching it float there.
"Miss May?" I call, not for the first time since she was frightened by the violent writhing of the fish's mortal struggle. "You've gotta eat this fish sometime!" I sigh, staring at it with knitted brow, unsure of how to proceed. "I thought you were supposed to be a fearsome predator, huh? What happened to that?" I call out, my taunt echoing pointlessly through the apartment's hall.
I sigh again and prop my chin on my hand.
'Shit,' I think again.
This is why I'm skipping work today. Now I'm just sitting on my toilet, pondering the fate of the salmon, who will never know the difference between a real life and a dream life.
I stand up and walk over to the fish.
'I can make it disappear,' I think to myself, hoping it'll be gone.
But it doesn't go away, so I bend over to start picking it up.
"Shit," I whisper under my breath as I reach for it, but soon I discover that: no, the salmon is not dead, merely pretending. Because it flops like a mother fucker and soaks the entirety of myself and my bathroom.
"That's it!" I say, "Fuck you fish! Your days are numbered!"
Struggling with the fish, we wrestle all the way back to my kitchen, where I call out for my cat, "Miss May! Prepare a platter—" it slaps me in the face with its tail "—Fuck! We will feast!" I declare, kneeling half-prone over this fish that seeks to make a mouse of me.
I crane, scooping its writhing agony into my arms and stand. With no platter or Miss May in sight, I grimace.
"Table food it is," I say grimly, then obscurely throw down the fish onto the table in the way of culinary technique.
As it collides with the table, the usual transformation of culinary skill shifts the salmon's body into a new shape, and suddenly I'm looking at a plate of steaming hot salmon, with butter and lemon.
I stare at the accomplishment in deep philosophical concern, my face twisted in its remorse.
"What the hell?" I sigh, incredulous. The universe, as if to answer my question, makes its will known through Miss May, who hops up on the table and begins to inspect the spread.
"I don't know what happened," I mutter, "but I guess I got lucky."
Taking my seat at the table, I too inspect the repast before us, but I'm distracted. I feel something odd in my mind, some kind of mental blockage. It feels like a foreign object has been inserted into my brain.
"Oh, this is weird," I say aloud, staring at the plate. Looking around the apartment, nothing else has changed. Everything seems ordinary, perfectly usual. Everything but me, it seems.
"Did I imagine it?" I ask myself, feeling somewhat concerned. "Hey, Miss May," I call out to my cat, who is now snacking on the salmon. "Do you see anything strange about your master?"
She looks up at me with her big green eyes, and licks her lips.
"No," she says.
I stare hard at her for a moment. "Oh my god I can talk to cats," I realize.
* * *