by Moore, Gabi
The evening was far from a relaxing experience. My brain was going faster than I cared to acknowledge. I tried all of my usual tricks, to get to sleep, but the only way I could manage was to smoke myself into oblivion with some serious hash. I was saving the hash for a special occasion, but coming down off of Foxy, after a close encounter with the law seemed like the best use at the moment. Staring into the void, I made my way into unconsciousness.
***
Usually my dreams are pretty vivid, but last night, I was more lucid than usual. I kept switching in and out of awareness. At times, it would totally flash on me, “This is a dream Stoker -- you can do anything you like.” Then, the next minute some other character in my dream would pull a question or look at me in a certain way, and the whole pretense of my own awareness would disintegrate. The other strange thing about the dream last night is it felt like I stayed there for a long time.
I started off walking down a lonesome street. There were dimly lit lanterns, that would flicker on and off as I would pass. A man approached me -- he was dark and his hair was long and flowing. The way that he walked seemed to indicate to me that he was someone who held himself in high regard. He didn’t seem pretentious, but he didn’t seem common either. I got the impression that he understood the value of posture, and could handle himself well in a fight. He was also attractive, at least in his physique. I couldn’t get a glimpse at his face -- I couldn’t make out whether or not he was cute, but his build was attractive to me.
The lithe ones are always a lot of fun to fuck.
In the moment, I had no great awareness of anything other than my own dick, and the fuckability of the approaching stranger. Once you’ve fucked in public like that, the taboos that prevent you from wanting to fuck on the street must be displaced. I didn’t feel the slightest bit of hesitation about the entire situation. What was better than anything else is that I didn’t have to go out of my way to seduce the guy either. I could tell he was into it from the moment the nearest street light flashed on his face.
He was beautiful, and I felt something powerful between my legs. A visceral part of my being wanted to grab him by the throat, bend him over and shove my cock inside of him. Strangest thing is that is exactly what he ended up doing to me instead.
The movement was so quick, and I had no time to respond. The flash speed in which he got behind me and held me close to him was unreasonable. The first sign that something was off, and that I may have been in a dream was the fact that there wasn’t any transitional information between when he approached me, and when he was behind me. All I knew was that my pants were off, and he was buried inside of me from behind. I thought about moving away from him, but while caught up in the struggle, I began to feel a type of latent ecstasy. The feeling of warmth spread throughout my entire body, and instead of feeling pain and humiliation, I felt an intense form of love.
I looked behind me, and instead of the original stranger I had seen walking on the street, I saw the boy from the night before. He looked at me with such kindness in his eyes, even though his fist firmly gripped the back of my hair. I submitted to him, but only because the feeling inside of me compelled me to do as much.
Bent over, feeling the length of him pull in and out of me, I let out a silent moan. I remember seeing the details in the cracks of the concrete below. Reaching out my hand and touching them, I felt the grit of the sidewalk on my fingertips.
There’s no way this is a dream, I thought to myself. It’s too real.
As soon as doubt came into my mind, I felt my ass getting pounded. The love was soft and beautiful no more. He was grabbing a hold of my hips now, and forcing me down to the ground. With my ass raised up in the air, he positioned himself behind me and began pounding his hips into mine. A felt a fire start to burn inside of me, and tears came into my eyes. When I looked behind me, I didn’t see the same person any longer, I saw a darkened version of my own self.
It was I; there was no mistaking that aspect of reality. However, the eyes were different. Instead of my own eyes, a dark void was present. Two endless black holes glared down at me, while the entity continued to fuck me in the ass.
I felt something pull from my inside, starting at the top of my head, and then moving downward along my vertebrae. The pull was transferred from within my body, and funneled into the penis of the thing which was fucking me. I felt a strange heartache, mixed with the overwhelming pleasure of being claimed by the thing. As his cock continued to pump into my asshole, I looked down, and saw my cock was hard. Glistening, golden pre-cum was dripping from the head of my cock. Where the cum fell on the ground, tiny flowers started to grow -- little beautiful violet flowers, that slowly changed shade into blue, orange and crimson as each thrust produced yet another drop.
When I focused on the beauty of the flowers, the tone of the sexual experience shifted once more. The flowers looked like wet paint on the pavement, and a new wave of lucidity overtook me.
“Stop,” I said, firmly, but not under any form of duress.
The movement stopped, and I felt him pass out from inside of my body. I struggled to stand up, my cock still at full attention. My asshole felt like it was wide and I was losing energy from inside of my body. Panic overtook me, while I stared at this creature that looked so much like myself. I wasn’t certain, but I thought I might actually die, right here on the street -- in front of my own self-styled incubus.
The acceptance of death swept over me like a sigh of relief. The fear and heartache of anxiety simply didn’t appear to be worth it any longer. I looked down at my own cock, and I didn’t recognize my body. I looked beautiful, but not in any way that implied I felt a sort of pride about my own appearance. For the first time in years, I felt what I can only describe as humility. I saw the entity standing before me, and looked at his soul.
His body was transparent, and I saw a dark cloud in his brain. The cloud dripped ink down onto his heart, and the ink flowed down, further still until it exited from his flaccid penis. I didn’t stop to wonder how he had fucked me with a limp dick. The whole situation seemed to make perfect sense. As I watched the pool of oil grow beneath his body, it began to swallow up the flowers that had arisen from my own seed. Each of the flowers erupted into flames. I looked down in despair.
Tiny monuments of my own failed pride, I thought.
The words were poetic, and came without any prompting on my part. My sorrow was a reflection of my own absence of tenderness. Now when I needed compassion more than anything, there was none to be found -- only the charred remains of something beautiful. The oil grew more quickly than the flowers had grown, and my feet were soon overtaken by the muck. I tried lifting them up, but I was held fast to the pavement. I couldn’t move, and my body began to sink.
Did I really deserve this? Surely this must be some form of hell.
When I looked up, I saw that the entity was standing on the oil like a satanic revision of Jesus. I reached out my hand to the bastard while I was sinking down into the earth.
“You did this, you fucker!” I screamed, totally losing my cool. “You help me out of it!”
The entity squatted down on the surface of the oil, and looked at me with a sad form of acceptance in its eyes. I was confused, because I expected the creature to have more malice toward me. Then I realized that the entity wasn’t actually responsible for this situation at all; I was.
When I was up to my lips in oil, the figure reached out a hand to grab ahold of my chin. He lifted me up so that I could still breathe. When I looked at him, he no longer appeared to be a demonic version of myself. He was the kid from the club, and his face glowed with a radiant light. He smiled at me gently, and the oil around him began to transmute into rainbow hues. I felt the iridescence pass through my body, as the heaviness from the oil passed away. As I looked around me, I saw that the landscape too was fading into that queer nothingness. The light began to pierce through our bodies, and the two of us also began to fade. The last thing I saw was his eyes, locking
in on mine while the rest of the dream disappeared.
Then there was nothing.
Chapter 9: Stoker
I woke up gasping for breath, and feeling my dirty sheets to make sure they were still there. My hands involuntarily went for my sides, then my dick, and then the rest of my body. I laughed at myself after I made sure that I hadn’t disappeared completely. Turns out I was still here, in all of my glory, and I had morning wood to top it all off.
“Fuck you,” I told my penis, feeling as though its betrayal had been the primary cause of the incident I had just experienced.
Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and feeling no rest whatsoever, I decided to roll out of bed. Usually, if I’m feeling sluggish like that in the morning, the last thing I want to do is get out of bed. I don’t like to hit the day unless I’m feeling 100 percent, or I’m fucked and need to take care of some shit. In the moment, I felt a sense of hopelessness associated with my usual lethargic form of indulgence.
“Who knows,” I muttered to myself. “I might fall asleep again. Wouldn’t want that to happen. Maybe today is a good day to start an uppers binge…”
I wasn’t serious. I knew some people who went down that road. The journey looks nice at the beginning, but eventually, it wears you out. When the psychosis hits, you don’t have to be asleep to fall into shit like that dream.
“Nope. Just coffee for me, thanks,” I replied, trying to set myself straight.
I walked into the kitchen, feeling oddly composed.
Usually when I party hard the night before, I tend to feel a bit unsettled the next day. I guessed that either the dream had scared me straight, or my body was simply acclimated to the drugs I had been experimenting with over the years. Either way, I didn’t get much in the way of a post-trip experience aside from some light tracers in my vision as I was getting the beans out from the cupboard.
I lived in a shitty apartment in a part of town where heroin addicts and homeless people were frequent. I made money selling pot, and had a couple of clients that I could count on for regular income. Apart from that, I had a few little side hustles -- nothing major. I had a bit of extra cash, but I stayed here because it was low key. I liked to be in control of when I was high profile, and when I kept hype at a lower register. I found that my public persona was something that I could manage a bit more easily when lived the majority of my life in seclusion. A person doesn’t tend to attract that much attention when they are living in Alphabet Town -- primarily because everyone else in the neighborhood has got enough of their own problems to manage.
The coffee was at least something worthwhile, even if the rest of the apartment was shit. I actually made sure that that everything I put inside of my body was primo. No sense in living a life of luxury in appearance, and having the sensual experience of a man in poverty. I’d rather have the other way around.
The coffee bubbled brown in my percolator with a tan, frothy cream on the top. I poured the liquid into a ceramic mug I stole from a thrift store, and then grabbed my sandals and tobacco. My standard morning ritual was to go outside next door to the apartment building where I lived, and sit down in a vacant lot to enjoy coffee and a cigarette. There’s a pepper tree out there, and a little piece of shit rocking chair I dragged out of the dumpster last year. The wood is worn from weather, but the chair has continued to hold together in spite of the elements. With a dream like I had last night, I desperately needed the time to reflect on how I wanted to move forward.
The air outside was clear, and when my sandals crunched the dry grass on the way out to the pepper tree, I felt like everything was in its right place. Some things didn’t change, and the sense of calm that I got from the vacant lot was a good thing. A smoke and a cup of coffee was an awesome way to start the morning. Things got a little less awesome when I made my way out to the tree.
“A fucking dead cat…?” I rubbed my face with my free hand.
Spilling a bit of coffee on my toe, I let my head hang toward the ground. Usually a sight like this wouldn’t really phase me. Everything dies, so I didn’t feel like there was much use in getting bummed out over it.
The major problem was that the cat had died on my fucking chair.
I didn’t feel like kicking a corpse off of my chair so early in the morning, so I let the poor bastard be. I lit my cigarette, and sat down a few feet away from the chair. I wasn’t able to direct my attention to much else, so I conceded to simply stare at the cat. The tobacco was sharp, but I enjoyed the way it woke me up and detached me from that present experience. I felt like I was able to think clearly about difficult shit, without bothering to wade through the emotional garbage that seemed to pile up around these issues.
Death.
Violence.
Nightmares.
Drugs.
Frankly, I was impressed that tobacco and coffee were my only consistent vices.
“Fucking cat,” I said out loud, cursing it for my own failures as a human.
As I sat there, I began to feel poorly for the cat. I actually regretted cursing it, and offered a silent apology. I thought about all of the different ways that the cat had hunted during its life. It might have been a house cat, but it looked mangy sitting there in the morning sun. No real way to tell.
Likely it hunted mice in this very field, I thought, letting out a long exhale.
Sipping on my coffee, I remembered a time when I had watched a cat involuntarily salivate and twitch its jaws when it saw a bird in a tree. There was no way that the cat would have actually reached the bird. It was an older bird, and it knew how to stay clear of predators like that. However, the bird’s distance from the ground made no difference to the cat. A base level feline instinct to kill and puncture was operating in practice regardless if there would be any contact with the bird at all. I was astonished, just thinking about the fact that killing was bred into their genes.
What really got me thinking was that my reflections of the cat as an innate killing machine were not entirely accurate. As I continued to sit and stare at the corpse, my rational grew increasingly more clear. People liked to look at a thing, and then classify it as that thing to the exclusion of all other identities. What’s more is that since humans have so much ego, they play that game with themselves. Projecting an image is powerful; that’s what “Stoker” is all about. The only problem is that when you wear the same mask all of the time, or when you discriminate and simplify, you tend to miss out on the larger picture.
For instance, cats also use their killer instinct to play. I had seen both housecats and semi-domesticated jungle cats at the zoo. Both of them hunted for food, and both of them used their prowess in a playful manner when a non-threatening situation arose. Cats were incredibly playful. They would fuck around with a piece of string and be completely satisfied, if only you left them alone. Not to mention the fact that the way they pick fights with one another, even from youth.
After all of that stalking and play fighting, cats also tend to sleep. When sleeping, cat’s look as though they are so lethargic they couldn’t hurt a thing. If you knew what a cat was, and you looked at one that was asleep, you’d simply think they were lazy -- not that they were incapable. The whole point is that they actually look like soft cuddly, purring pillows, more than ruthless killing machines.
Sometimes, cats just want to share affection. I can’t even tell you how many times a stray has come up to me on the street with the expressed interest in reaching out to me and rubbing on my leg. They start to purr, and then if you’re not too busy pretending to be a badass, you can’t help but bend down and give them at least a scratch or two. I haven’t had any cats personally. If I was to be honest with myself, I’ve been far too self-involved to care for anyone besides myself for most of my adult life. Regardless of my own personal habits, one can’t help but appreciate the fact that other people have chosen to take care of cats, and that I receive whatever incidental affections these animals happen to offer.
Though I project myself as kind
of a hardass, I actually do a bit of reading in my spare time. Mythologically speaking, cats can even be protectors. I mean, just take a look at Egyptian mythology. You have Bast, who is basically a Goddess of Families and Protection. Don’t even get me started on the fact that cats have long been the choice du jour of as witches familiars. Even if you don’t buy into all of that stuff, the fact that people still think in that way is astounding evidence that something is happening on a psychological level. Frankly, after last night, I’m a lot more inclined to believe in the metaphysical than I have been. Personal experiences tend to push a person from indulgent materialism to agnosticism pretty fast.
What a strange beast, to be both viscous and tender in the same life, I thought to myself, while stubbing out my cigarette.
The cat didn’t bother with conscious transitions. Life is complex enough without have to be self conscious over when you are vicious and when you aren’t. I know that as humans we can’t just go on and be assholes whenever we feel like it. If someone cuts us off on the street, it probably isn’t a good idea to throw a rock at them -- that sort of thing. However, I don’t see cat’s throwing rocks; their aggression is in balance with nature. Maybe we as humans could use a bit more wrestling in the streets -- as long as we knew when to start and when to stop. You don’t see too many feline to feline murders either.
