Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 57.1: June 24th, 2012

Dream Sequence
by Belinda Roddie

It seems to happen the same way
every night –
the moment

your cheeks begin to
tingle on the pillow,
and the air that
stirs in your lungs melts away and becomes helium, and your
feet feel like two balloons with the static buzzing and
crackling on your dry skin. Floating,
unable to run,
unable to

stop the flurry of pins
and needles stabbing at
your ripe calves. A 101 degree temperature that
fuses the sheets together in a
sticky kiss and turns sights, sounds,
smells, and tastes
all into colors.

You smoke green and you
see red, and you
watch the world go yellow.Your
veins stain orange while your
lips turn blue, and you taste
peach and nectarine, light and frothy, and you’re
floating again. When a man closes a brown suitcase,
it congeals, turns gooey,
like a chocolate truffle with a
foamy handle. Gray becomes

coffee cup steam. Black
is a misnomer. Egg white is not white. A
lump of gold is a slab of butter. Silver eyes
are nickels. Pennies are broken teeth.
Nicotine dripping from
ivory. All dripping. All flesh
moving outward in an thawed out exhalation.

The mattress breathes beneath
you and the covers slip
sighing away from your shoulders,
and as you

lie
exposed

with the poking and prickles
all along your back,
you know you’re awake,
and it’s the bed that’s sleeping now.

The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since June 24th, 2012.