A Dream Monologue

I was a young boy. Nothing more, nothing less than a young boy, if a boy at all. The ghostly figures marched on as I watched, their multicolored eyes fixated on a future that no one else could see. The horizon was in sight. They were people, not monsters, of course, but their march was slow, firm, and deliberate. The sea of empty faces continued to shift along the road. My father turned to me, and in a calm voice, he spoke. "That will be me one day. That will be all of us one day. Son, when you grow up, aid them. They're broken, they're damned, they have nothing left, not even life. Who knows if there's a heaven or a hell past the skyline. They sure don't. You needn't be a savior, but do what you can. You'll always have more then

He tired as the sky turned a comfortable, dark shade of ebony. I fell asleep on an internal clock. I went to lay down for eight hours, and slept a dreamless sleep until morning. Father would tell me of his dreams. They seemed odd. What's the point of dreaming, if the world in the dream doesn't exist? Father also had an odd ritual. Thrice a day, he would lay out my onyx blanket, taking care not to stain in with black wine, and consumed some sort of nourishment. It varied from day to day. Sometimes, a wrinkled black fruit about the size of the nail on my thumb, sometimes, the plump black flesh from an unknown source. Occasionally, even a black liquid in a bowl, which was slurped up. I was given the impression that the liquid was for very special occasions. There were many other odd habits that father seemed accustomed to doing. I never kept rigid track; he was simply an abnormal

Father never spoke aloud again, so I assumed he had a dreadful lapse in judgement, and his continued silence was his way of resuming our normal silent relationship. I grew, as we people tend to do, and as people tend to do even more commonly, father died. A day later, as the parade passed on the faded sepia road, I saw his face. I thought I saw his face. I didn't see his face. But.... I could've sworn that I saw his face. The scenery was blinking erratically. I stood still, unmoving as all the shades of black around me shifted their tones. That was all that the landscape was, really, sepia dust, black, and the sepia road cutting straight through the middle of nowhere. It wasn't i that got darker. The world itself seemed to mourn my father and his passing. His passing. His death. His broken, damned, lifeless death. Going to whatever the hell there was after the horizon ended. I didn't have an idea of what he meant. I didn't know what he knew. He never told me what he knew. He might not have known what he knew. He probably had no idea what was happening that day as we sat, watching the