For Key Center Writer's Group
Loosely based in fact; mildly embellished for entertainment value. Names have been withheld to protect the guilty.
When I dream, I
don't go to fascinating planets full of aliens, robots, monsters or
fantasy characters that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. No. I
dream of things that are going on in my life that are very real, but
twisted in a distorted and upside-down way.
After falling asleep
one night two weeks ago, I had this dream that was not quite a
nightmare, but it came damned close. It was kind of a feverish sleep
because I was fighting this odd, 48-hour bug that was going around.
One of the farm hands, at the ranch I live on, has a little boy that
comes on certain days of the week instead of daycare, and he
inevitably brings “biological containments” into the household. I
don't have children of my own, so until the little guy was introduced
to me, I seldom ever got sick. He's a cute little kid, and apparently
infectious as well. I have heard him described as the “walking
Petri dish.” He's engaging we adults in biological warfare by
making us all sick with whatever he picks up at daycare.
Whenever I am asleep
with a fever, my dreams are much more vivid than usual, and even
stranger. This dream was a random culmination of the last 15 years
that I've been living in Washington State. I suddenly was on the USS
Carl Vinson again. It's the nuclear aircraft carrier that I was
assigned to during my last tour of duty in the US Navy which ended 11
years ago. I found myself in the large Hangar Bay 3, and the ship was
underway. I was surrounded by thousands of white rabbits. They were
everywhere, and hopping around. I was the only one in the hangar with
them. I felt that there was something important that I had to do with
them, but was not sure exactly what it was. My only clues were the
big cardboard cartons, three of them labeled “Small, Medium, and
Large.” in large chicken scratch Sharpie (permanent marker)
letters.
I began to sort the
rabbits by size. They were soft but muscular rabbits, and didn't have
much loose skin to grab onto by the scruffs of their necks. It make
picking them up kind of a challenge. Some of them were easier to
handle because they would be calm and cooperate, while other put up a
big struggle. Usually, the very large rabbits were the ill-tempered.
Feisty and angry would be the best way to describe them. They were
scratching the hell out of my arms, and the cuts smartly stung.
As I picked up the
larger rabbits and put them into the appropriate cartons, I realized
that they were instantly replaced by either dozens of baby bunnies or
really large rabbits—larger and larger they seemed to get. They
kept showing up in the hangar bay, getting bigger and bigger while
the smaller bunnies became more and more numerous. Some of the
rabbits I picked up off the deck dropped lots of bunnies out of the
butts. These bunnies would clump together in some instances and turn
into even larger rabbits. This just made the task of getting all the
rabbits off the hangar deck futile. I could hear the hangar deck
officer over the 1MC calling the crew to come down for a FOD
walk-down. He would follow it up by stating the importance of picking
up the rabbits so they would get sucked into jet engines. There was a
tone of urgency in his voice and the tension in the air was thick and
salty.
The bigger rabbits
were also pretty ferocious. Some of them started to snarl like lions,
and charge at me. I found a conveniently placed cattle prod on the
deck. It put out some serious voltage. With each discharge, the
voltage seemed to increase, and this angered the really big rabbit of
the bunch that now was about fifteen feet tall. When it roared, I
could feel it's hot breath that smelled like rabbit feed. Before I
knew it, the cattle prod was throwing bolts of lightning, and the
ship was listing more than ten degrees to the starboard side.
I remembered
thinking “Why are we doing a high powered turn with all these
monster white rabbits in here?” The smaller bunnies were hard to
catch because they were really fast and kept hopping around and
bouncing like popcorn at the movie theater. “HA! Popcorn bunnies!”
I thought out-loud. I pointed the prod and threw a bolt of powerful
lightning to subdue the enormous rabbit growling in front of me.
It became very
apparent that I was not going to get this big one under control, and
the ship was listing and turning pretty hard. With each list, the
rabbits and bunnies would roll, hop or run to one side or the other
of the hanger bay in favor of the movement of the ship. It would also
seem that the added weight of the rabbits was contributing the the
pitching and listing of the ship. I ran toward an open port side
watertight door. I could see the ladderwell on the other side that
led below decks to the aft galley.
I ran into the
compartment and dogged the door tight behind me, and just in the nick
of time—because “Bunzilla” smashed into the bulkhead with a
heavy thud, leaving a sinister imprint of its snarling profile in the
steel plating.
It was very strange
in that compartment, because some of the little bunnies managed to
follow me inside, but they were just hopping around harmlessly. I
went down the ladder and entered the galley and crew all seemed to be
blissfully unaware of the rabbit infestation on the ship and lunch
was going on as usual. I grabbed a tray and headed toward the hotdog
bar and got a baked potato and some rabbit sausage. Looking at the
menu on the bulkhead next to the bullseye by the exit into the dining
area, I read it out loud “North Korean BBQ Night.”I noticed that
there was a spit in the kitchen area behind the baked potatoes and
Kim Jung Un was roasting an suspiciously familiar animal that
resembled an annoying, face-eating little satanic designer dog I once
knew. I looked back down at the potatoes in the bin and noticed that
they all had roots and plants starting to grow out of them.
So I grabbed a
schlitzengrubben and saurekraut instead and headed into the dining
area where I found my Grammy and Pappy sitting at a table waiting for
me. Oddly enough, this did not strike me as being strange, and I woke
up a little, feeling kind of hot, but the blankets were my protective
shield from the cool morning air and I was not ready to get up yet.
It was still dark outside. I checked the clock and it was 5:54.
But when I fell back
into my disturbing slumber, I found myself in Montgomery,
Pennsylvania with my grandparents, having dinner in their favorite
restaurant. The dinner I had picked out on the Vinson was waiting for
me, but it had gone cold and was now growing potato blossoms and a
couple of baby bunnies were sitting in the middle of the plate,
nibbling on the kraut.
My grammy has
Alzheimer's and it's pretty advanced. Despite medication that has
slowed the progress of this disease significantly, her pilot house
has nobody at the helm most of the time. But she has an amazing
ability to “fake-it” and appear pretty normal by just agreeing
with things that are said on occasion, and nodding. Every now and
again, she'll laugh in an inappropriate place during conversation or
repeat an obscure fact several times in the course of a half-hour or
more.. On the really bad days, but fortunately rare, she'll lose it
and scream at Pap by accusing him of sleeping with hookers, or
insisting that she be taken to her house where she lived when they
were first married. She now stays at Shady Pines in Warrensville
where she is much happier and Pappy visits her everyday. He signs her
out and takes her on “dates” or doctor's appointments frequently.
She likes this, but sees him an attractive stranger and insists to
him that he not tell her husband.
But this particular
night she was more conversational than usual, and after a brief
dining experience and conversation, of which, I can't remember all
the details, the three of us piled into the truck. My pap has a 2004
Dodge crew cab, white in color, with all the bells and whistles. It
is one of those really nice S.U.V. Kind of trucks that practically
will drive itself. But you can imagine my dismay when I saw Grammy
getting behind the wheel! I was already sitting in the front seat on
the passenger side next to her, and Pap was in the back, just
chuckling and teasing me. Meanwhile, without me noticing, Gram had
already started driving and we were suddenly spinning into a sideways
slide at the foot of the hill by their house in the country near
Muncy! She had the accelerator floored and the back wheels were
spinning and white smoke was everywhere, and she held the truck like
this for some time and I asked Pap “WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING?”
“We're waiting for
that semi-truck to pass by!” he laughed as he pointed at the
18-wheeler bearing down on us with it's lights blazing and horn
honking. Meanwhile, Grammy just laughed. . . .
I woke up to a half
conscious state, realizing that it wasn't dark anymore and that I had
to go to the bathroom. I had this strange feeling like I was sitting
on a warm waterbottle, then realized I had to throw those shorts
away.
The End
