The moon dreamt…
Thomas lay on the sofa, visions of ice and death cascading before his mind’s eye, coalescing and dissociating to the tempo of his randomized playlist. Beethoven and Debussy had brought images of soft blue ice and barren landscape, Holst had ushered in rains of fire, Dvorak had seen the last remnants of humanity struggling for survival under a sunless sky, and Chopin had brought a ray of sunshine. The AVR then began blasting the guttural roars of Amon Amarth, the sound of marauding heavy metal vikings breaking Thomas out of his stupor.
It took a while for his mind to get used to the world outside the dream– to the dew coalescing on his window that blurred his view of the Golden Gate Bridge, to the soft light of dawn, to the smell of coffee that was permeating his little studio apartment, to his stomach that was growling to be fed– it took a while to fully wake up.
What was wrong with him, he wondered as he poured himself another cup of coffee and placed two slices of bread in the toaster. Why were his dreams becoming so damn weird? Were they just dreams, or was the apocalypse really coming? The humming birds, that usually came around this time of year, were missing. The sun looked bigger than it should have, and paler somehow. The clouds looked weird– like dragons flying through the sky.
There was a knock at his door, a sharp rat-a-tat-tat. He’d have known that knock anywhere.
“John,” he smiled, as he opened the door, “glad you came. I need a ride.”
“Oh, just buy a BART card already, you cheap bastard,” his brother grinned. He was dressed for a meeting, looking sharp in a suit that was creased in all the correct places. He’d even put on a lapel, which meant he was hoping to bag some baby boomer big wigs today.
“BART card? You’d stop visiting me if you thought I didn’t need a drop every now and then. Could I borrow a twenty? I’m a little short today.”
John shook his head, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be. I don’t want to dull the edge of your husbandry.”
“My husbandry?” Thomas asked, feigning shock. John’s presence always made Thomas cheer up. Maybe John would be able to help with the weird dreams, but Thomas was reticent about sharing the experience. It was scary, and made him sound like a mad man.
“What’s up, little buddy?” asked John, sensing the change in his mood.
“What if you knew that the world was going to end? That meteors were going to fall from the sky, the sky was going to be so thick with clouds that they wouldn’t let in the sunlight, and stuff like that. All our money would be pretty darn useless then, wouldn’t it? All our jobs and infrastructure wouldn’t mean a thing. Civilization would be in complete collapse. What would people like you or me do in a world like that, a financial analyst and a history major?”
“Well,” John closed his eyes in thought, wincing as Thomas chomped on his burnt toast, “we’d be dead meat if that was all we were. Humans adapt, don’t they? Tell you what, once you’re done with this semester let’s take a vacation to Canada and muck around in the wilderness and learn some survival skills. That would cheer us both up, eh?”
“Eh,” Thomas agreed.
A humming bird flew past his window.
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A/N: I thought I’d put this up just to give you kind ladies and gentlemen an idea of what this would look like after one round of editing. The novels I write usually go through this process around three or four times before I’m satisfied. Here’s what it looked like in the Outline I’ve been posting on this blog:
The moon god dreamt…
Thomas knew there’d be trouble as soon as he heard the medley reach its climax. It was too perfect, too smooth. Oh, what had he done? One did not fuse Beethoven, Debussy, Gustav Holst, Dvorak and Chopin into a single entity. The transition from Moonlight Sonata to Claire De Lune had been fine, but then when his playlist had started on Mars the Bringer of War, into the third movement of the New World Symphony and culminating with the Funeral March, Tom knew that it could mean only one thing… the end of the world as he knew it. Visions of the future, cold and lifeless, filled his thoughts, moonlight shining white and bright only on a few scattered corners of the world. He felt like flinging his speakers to the ground and destroying them with a baseball bat. Did he even have a baseball bat?
No, a hammer would have to do, but what was the point in even trying? The damage was already done. Wrecking his speakers wouldn’t change a damn thing. The universe had already heard the song. Instead, he put on some Amon Amarth and tried to think, his mind flying to new heights on the eddies of the guttural growls of 21st century vikings. There was comfort in this sound, melody within cacophony, method within madness, honour won and glory earned in a barbaric and murderous world, virtuoso solos within distorted power chords. This was what the Fifth Symphony sounded like in hell. Amon Amarth helped him see things with new perspective. Tom had broken the world and he had no idea how to fix it.
Perhaps it was time he took up ice fishing.
Whispers of the Universe 