kalechipskid | dream diary: the one with the angel (Reply)

Sometimes I have really vivid dreams. They normally follow strange storylines and have a certain scent to them, so when I wake up I end up amazed. This dream is my favorite of all. It’s about two brothers who have a creature like an angel in their bathroom. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days on end, trying to draw the characters and capture the feeling once more. In the original dream they didn’t have proper names but they looked like Ian and Jeremy from Hagio Moto’s A Cruel God Reigns, so I’ll call them that. Anyhow, here is the dream.

The mall is the one place Jeremy feels like he can feel good. The sounds of people rushing in and out, the constant chatter at the food court and squeak of the tiles with every step mix together into an overwhelming cocktail of din that's just enough to make him forget the thing his brother keeps in the bathroom.

He loses himself in wonder at the front of a toy store, where a retro robot is on display. He's too old for this sort of thing now but he always enjoys looking. There's a poster plastered next to it, explaining that the toy robot is actually incredibly rare, a prop from a show that's been lost to time. Something you shouldn't touch. But Jeremy can't help but want to fiddle with it, if only a little bit.

"Jeremy," A strong voice calls out, ripping him away from his fantasy. "It's time to go home." It's Ian. He stands taller than the rest of the crowd. At the mall, he never looks at anything-- He waits impatiently for Jeremy to have his fun, only to yank it away when his own thoughts go back to that. It's like walking a dog to him, Jeremy thinks, trudging back obediently.

On the car ride back, Ian taps his fingers impatiently on the wheel. He's anxious. Jeremy thinks most people would see him and assume he needed a cigarette, a quick something to hold him over. There are no words between them the whole ride home.

The brothers have no parents, no family besides each other, and at this point no real friends. Their house is stately but slightly unkempt, with ivy sprouting up and nobody caring. The curtains are always drawn. They do not live alone.

As soon as they enter, Ian shoots up the stairs and there's the sound of a door ripping over and immediately slamming. But in between those impossibly small seconds of the bathroom door being locked and locked again, there is a slick sound, crashing, and an inhuman sob. Jeremy sighs and all thoughts are consumed with the need to go to the mall again.

Ian always insists on bringing it down for dinner. He usually gets frustrated and loses it halfway through, sending plates and utensils flying when its whines become too great. Tonight is even worse, as the guest is feeling particularly upset and letting it be known. It refuses to eat, instead crying and kicking at the table.

"Just leave it upstairs." Jeremy grumbles. Spaghetti is an old favorite of his, but he can hardly remember the last time he's enjoyed eating in this house.

Ian abandons his own dinner in an attempt to feed the thing by hand, as if it was a blubbering child. "We can civilize it, Jeremy. It just needs to- to get accustomed to our-- oh, Goddamn it!" A full plate of spaghetti lands Ian's shirt and now far off the end of his rope he simply reaches over, grabs the creature by the hair and drags it cursing back up the stairs. Jeremy winces as he hears the sound of wings flapping, doors slamming, and the distinctive whap of the hallway wall being kicked for dear life. Eventually, his brother comes back down, seats himself shakily and finishes his meal as if it was all a bad dream.

Every night, the creature can be heard sobbing. There are the sounds of shampoo bottles being knocked over, walls being scratched at and feathers brushing the ceiling. Jeremy wishes every night for it to end, so that his brother could go back to normal-- but mostly, he just wants a decent night's sleep.

Sometime in the summer, Ian proposes a road trip.

It's a terrible idea from the start. The trip is entirely too long and the participants completely unwilling but Ian insists that it'll be great fun if only they give it a chance. Jeremy knows it'll only be a matter of time before his brother loses it and turns the car around, but the hours before that full of violent tantrums will be a lot to put up with.

Ian is busy preparing the car, so it's up to Jeremy to fetch the thing.

The nights have been just as noisy but lately the chorus has changed-- sobs and crashing have dissolved into rattling breath, so deep it absorbs the entire house in its labor. Dinners are still arduous affairs but nowadays the trouble comes less from protest and more from cleaning up the feathers that fall from its wilting wings when Ian carries it back up the stairs.

When Jeremy unlocks the bathroom door, he sees that the thing has gotten its wing stuck in the towel rack and is now hanging from it limply. Jeremy thinks it resembles a dead cat. When untangling its wing, he's met with little struggle and wonders how hard it would be to bury this thing in the yard. He pictures a tiny gravestone, alongside the mound that once was the family dog.

Jeremy helps it get dressed. The clothes Ian bought hang pathetically from the creature's emaciated frame, its pale arms looking like bone dangling from the wide holes of the t-shirt. It's settled in the back seat of the car, where its head lolls against the straining seat belt. Ian sees it in the rearview mirror and grins. Jeremy keeps his eyes glued to the window.The start of the car ride is surprisingly pleasant, and it's only a few hours in when the creature in the back seat begins to whine, shaking against the seat belt. Ian immediately goes to cooing at it-- "Ooooh, shush there little angel, hush now little angel, that's it that's it"-- until the thing tires itself out and falls into silence.

"Quit doing that." Jeremy snaps after another round of cooing. To him, it's more unbearable than the whines.

Ian's smile hardly falters. "It's working, Jeremy. See how it's listening? Why, I think it's halfway civilized." "You just sound stupid." "Look, Jeremy. Look at how it's looking at us. I think it's listening. Look."

The younger brother begrudgingly twisted back to meet the eyes of the creature, the creature that cried and moaned and kicked and was now reduced to shedding thinning feathers all over the back of the car seat. How much better it would've been, Jeremy thought, if it had died that night, bleeding in the middle of the street, if his brother had never brought it home, if he never got a chance to sound so stupid as he did calling it angel in a baby voice.

It's somewhere in the middle of the Idaho desert that Jeremy turns on the radio, and it's two thirds through one of the sappier songs there's a gargle from the back seat. From the rear view mirror there's the perfect view of the supposed angel, choking through the heat, trying to squeak out a few notes to go along with the song. Ian is delighted. He cranks up the radio to an ear-blasting volume, his eyes gleefully darting from the road to the creature struggling to keep up with the melody. Eventually its voice cracks and comes out fuller than it ever has, sailing over the muffled voices of the radio. It carries the same deepness as the late-night breath that shook the house. The whole car reverberates with its voice and so do the riders within. It sings so strongly, all thoughts are carried away.

"Perfect. Perfect, beautiful." Ian's mouths through oncoming tears. And all at once, it's over.

The angel's voice breaks off unceremoniously as their nose erupts into blood-- And just as the crimson pours onto their shirt, the car engine gives out with a wheeze. The moment is too much to process but once the man at the wheel feels the car grind to a full stop, he flings open the door and explodes into a shrill storm of orders and curses that ends with him making a hefty dent in the bumper with the tip of his boot.

Jeremy watches his brother stew in pain and anger, watches him make circles on the side of the road, stop, remember, rush to the side of the car to rip open the back door and run his hands all over the pallid creature now stained with blood, panicked, giddy, in over his head. He watches blankly as he screams something at him, then feels burning anger as his brother tells him to watch over the damn thing before stomping off to work away under the hood of the sputtering car. He looks to the angel who continues to bleed all over itself, but in its normally blank eyes is a startling clarity that replaces his anger with shock. The seat is soaking dark with crimson, and it will be impossible to wash away.

Ian does not hear the footsteps behind him, nor does he expect the car hood to meet the back of his head with such strong force. His body goes limp against the car. His brother stands in anxious shock, hands stinging from the heat of sun-beat metal.

Jeremy breaks away from his horror and drags the thing from the car seat and onto the sandy road, trying to prop it up on its own stick legs. It's light and its skin papery around bird-like bones. It wobbles at first, but impossibly it manages to stand through sheer force of will. Jeremy's hands leave its side as its breath begins to grow, deep with resonant whistles.

Jeremy pulls his brother's body from the street and back into the front seat of the car, carefully placing his hands on the wheel. He seats himself shotgun, and from there he can see the broken creature find strength to hobble down the blistering road, its wings dragging feathers through sheets of sand. He watches it until it is a small speck in the distance. He thinks of his dog, before he was a displaced patch of dirt in the backyard, excitable and friendly, jumping up at the dinner table and tracking mud through the house, how his slobbering kisses left stains all over and how much he loved to receive them. He thought about the day they'd spent at the beach, how hard they ran across the sand the day before his heart gave out.

The speck in the distance had finally disappeared, and he closed his eyes like it was all a bad dream.

The dream might seem too coherent to be an actual dream, but that’s because I cut out the opening segment where me and my friends rode one of those old-fashioned railroad carts through the Utah desert to a Sonic the Hedgehog themed trampoline amusement park. Otherwise, the dream was pretty serious in tone. Ian’s forceful personality came through quite a bit.