And then it all started going blurry

She had asked me a question; it was quite rude not to answer, but the words had half-slipped away like the way my crumpled shirt was slowly resigning itself to the floor from the edge of the bed.

"What do you thin k a b o u t w
h
e

n...?"

It was more soothing than anything else.

I was on a stretcher on a trampoline on a cirrus mattress. I looked to my right and watched a man named Thomas walk by and he tipped his hat to the wall. The base of his hat started expanding, but then so did the whole hat and it suddenly looked just like the lampshade on her desk. I had drifted off...

"Don't know?"

I turned my head quickly to the side to indicate I was still awake -- a feeble attempt at denying that the weight of my eyelids were a blanket to my waking life.

"Well...I mean, of course I think that people shouldn't be forced to do anything against their will. And there are no positive obligations..."

I barely was able to form the last of the words when a comical looking ice cream man poked his strange little head out from behind his cart down the street. He had a hat that I couldn't see -- It wasn't as if it was obstructed behind the brightly colored overhang, the hat just literally seemed to evade my eyes. Every time I tried to look at it, it would remove itself and retreat to my peripheral vision. It was much like the dots that swim around your eyes sometimes in the dark. You can never catch them. But in all my cleverness, I could only make out that the hat was vaguely mushroom in shape and it was a color that I could not name.

Then she was talking to me again, and I was in her room with my head resting on her stomach, and she was breathing and I was letting the light burn holes in my eyes and her voice trickled down to seal them up. I tried to whisper a quiet thanks, but I was slipping away again...

The ice cream man looked nervous now. He had just served two scoops of pistachio to a man with an intense smile, but I somehow knew this man was very disappointed with his ice cream. A green drop of the melting pistachio landed on the toe of Mr. Smile's leather shoe, and even though he didn't seem to notice, I knew this was an indication of the last straw in a very, very long feud over the quality of the ice cream man's desserts. Mr. Smile seemed to speak entire conversations with his eyes, and there was now a look of horror in the ice cream man's face. His hat danced and twitched nervously at the edge of my view.

Mr. Smile winked not once, but twice, then turned to face the two customers, a man and a woman, waiting patiently in line behind him. They both seemed to be more than happy to wait patiently, or to be alive, or just to stand there where their legs were and their arms in their pockets and their eyes filled with anticipation for more days ahead of them, undoubtedly filled with waiting and lines and the promise of ice cream.

Mr. Smile asked if the man behind the woman could move slightly to his right, so that he would then be standing directly behind the woman. The man didn't speak, but happily agreed and, with a slight giggle, did just that. Mr. Smile then asked the gleeful pair what their favorite kinds of ice cream were. They responded almost immediately.

"Raspberry Sorbet"

"Hazelnut"

"Very good choices," said Mr. Smile. He clasped his hands together happily behind his back and for some reason felt the need to bow. How awkward, I thought.

"Now, I want you both to open your mouths as wide as you can -- and you must close your eyes -- and imagine, if you will, that you're tasting all the finest Raspberry and Hazelnut ice cream in the world right now."

The two eagerly agreed and seemed more than ready to cooperate. They both opened their mouths expectantly, waiting for all the lovely taste imagination could possibly deliver. Neither of them saw Mr. Smile remove a large gray revolver from somewhere behind his back, and neither of them heard when he pulled back the trigger -- all the while living up to his name. He took aim and before I could say a thing, the barrel of the revolver was in the young lady's mouth.

Then there was a sound like a city collapsing upon itself.

There were fragments of throat, skull, spine, and blood decorating the young man's face, as his own similar mess of flesh clung to the wall behind him, having just been ejected from the hole in the back of his head that matched perfectly the one in the young lady's head directly in front of him.

And they just kept standing there, but now with a horrible and immovable sadness in their eyes. Mr. Smile smiled, took out a handkerchief, wiped off his revolver, and turned around to face the ice cream man who at this point was trying to pull his hat out of the violent seizure it was having...

I woke up. My eyes felt like vacuums that were sucking on my head, taking in all my blood and patience and thought just to keep them open.

"You must be really tired, we can go to sleep now..."

"I'm fine, but yes, we should try to get some sleep."

--------- An Epilogue ----------

Later in the evening, or maybe the early morning, I found myself with a bouquet of some of the most attractive flowers I'd ever seen. I was slowly twisting the wrapped base of stems in my hands, careful to avoid the thorns here and there. I came to understand that I was sitting at a table and I was very deliberately staring at my shoes, and though I felt a presence at the opposite side of the table, I knew who he was without having to look up. I couldn't have looked up anyway.

"Do you know what it's like," he asked, choking and gagging on something far worse than tears, "to have everything taste like blood?"

Sitting as still as my chair, I was certain my eyes were about to become X-rays that went through my shoe.

"Or to tell someone 'hello, I'm Jeffrey,' and spatter their face with your blood and then another tooth falls out of your mouth because they are all dying and they have all been dying since losing half of your jaw and their death is only made more deathly by the cold breeze that now blows in through the back of your head and passes out of what's left of the front of your mouth?

Here he paused, succumbing to a horrible fit of convulsive coughs and I heard him choking on the redness.

Stabilized but drowning, he continued. "And the one person I asked to look at me only looked through me at the clock on the wall, and she stared at it for maybe eight seconds before running out of the room and it all just tastes like so much blood."

I had by now pricked all my fingers on the thorns and I was sure I could see the dirt, worms, rocks, and earth through my shoes and my feet and the floor and the foundation.