Friday, August 20, 2010

Mad World

The dream is in black and white.  It's always in black and white.

I am a young boy, 13 or 14, and I am beyond thin.  I am emaciated, frail, as are the other living skeletons around me.  Determining anyone's age is impossible as they all look like 100 year old men.  I probably look the same way.
We stand in a line, men in uniforms with guns herding us to a field outside of the barbed wire fences.  Once in the field, terror grips my chest as we are all handed a shovel and commanded to dig.

Tears are burning down my face, and I know I am going to die.  They do not ask people to dig holes and then take them back to camp.  Smoke from the oven pours into the sky, blackening and polluting the air.  All I want is to kiss my mother and have her hold me one last time.  I am a little boy.  I do not want to die.

In all too short a time, the holes are completed.  They scream at us to get on our knees, and I comply, crying and praying and begging for salvation.  There is none to come.  I am the 4th person down, and they stand behind the first man, striking him in the back of the neck with the blade of the shovel.  He falls in his shallow grave.  I close my eyes and wait.  There is an eternity before the next blow hits.

The second strike and then the body drops.
The third strike. 

My turn.  
In the dream, I feel the pain on my neck, and my body becomes paralyzed as I hit the bottom of my hole.  Everything begins to blur, the dirt hindering my breath, until there is just black.

And then I wake up.

I don't know my name, the boy's name.  Maybe if I knew that I would have something to go off of, prove to myself that it isn't real.  

It isn't the only black and white dream I have, not the only recurring one.  It's just the one that haunts me the most.

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