Sunday Comix: (dream of fire)
2004-04-12 - 11:52 a.m.
����Over time I have learned this one thing from my dreams. They do not translate well. Many times, I run across words that simply cannot be described well in English, and without the knowledge of these words, it is complicated to try and describe the situation that is in the dream.
����The house was lit entirely by the fire that burned near the entrance. It had two levels, but where the second part overhung the first there was nothing, so the house must have been built onto something (like a funny shaped rock) or there was some sort of storage outside which I never saw. The family consisted of a baby brother, mother, father, and two sisters, one newly born. I had come home after some sort of journey, a long time away from home. Part of the journey had to do with collecting sand from a certain beach. I was handing the sand over for my father to inspect�and then he gave a story. i did not need to question at this point, whether it was part of the journey or not, because to me, everything was.
����My character changed, though I did not at first notice it because there were no mirrors. I see the cabin from the eyes of the two-year-old brother, watch my younger sister as mother cleans up her shit in a basin. For some reason this aggravates me, I think since I am already two, I should be able to clean myself. I stood upright then, and walked to the proper place of business-doing, and cleaned myself afterward. I was not proud of this accomplishment, but acknowledged it as a father might acknowledge a child of eight does something that should have been done at four. I then walked to the sitting room, and talked to my older brother (it was obvious that it was the first time I had spoken, but the family did not act surprised, only regarded my words as words) about his memories, which I had. I asked him, �do you remember this memory (a picture of him writing something for a academic class)� and after a while he said yes, he could see it. Then I asked what was the last thing he had done before heading out on his journey. He said something related to how he had prepared before the journey (which I had no memory of), but I wanted him to say something about the dance (which was somehow linked with academics) that had taken place before he left. He replied that he did not well remember it, and that much more had happened since he had been to his last dance. �we have diverged already greatly� I said, and for days after I was silent.
����Two years went by, and I had been speaking less and less since my first speaking. My family was missing father and the younger of the two sisters. I was relieved at how, now that I stood upright all the time, I looked so much more like the people around me. There was a person staying with us then, whom we called �man of the fire�, or �burning wood� or something akin to it. he did not seem to eat or sleep, and spent all day starring at our fire, demanding that we keep fueling the fireplace, which we did by chopping down more wood each day. As the trees became more scarce, the walks back and forth to the cabin became more tedious, and my older brother and sister were having a hard time feeding the fire. Mother would help them sometimes, but did not like to leave me alone with the fire watcher. Seeing my family�s troubles, and seeing that the firewatcher was gone (which only happened for short periods of time each day) I said to the others in my old-for-my-age voice, �why don�t you just kill the wood burner?� inspired by the fact that I was talking again, they looked stern, preparing their minds for a fight. I walked over to the side of the fire and drew out the iron fire pokers, each one custom-made to the person of the family that owned it. Father�s fire poker was many-pointed and would have dealt more damage to the intruder, but it was also yet too heavy for my older brother to use, and it would have been an insult were he to be killed using it. I had my own fire poker, just a straight pointed iron rod, even though I was not yet old enough for the responsibility of keeping the fire going at night. This poker being too heavy for me, I went instead to the �soul sticks�, carvings that each person of the family had made that depicted how tall you were at what a certain age (indicated by a number of gargoyle-shapes in groups of four). It also represented differences in attitude and crafting skill between successive years, as each person had to carve their own. My bother�s stick had four horned demons circling the top with other demons below, and my stick (much shorter) had only four hornless demons on the head.
����The firewatcher returned and sat in front of the fire again. I could see his face from the front, but the fire illuminated it none, he was as a silhouette. Surely, this was a demon before us. I picked up an iron pot, and remember it being valuable, but it was necessary that I should use it in this case, so mother would not mind. I threw first the top of the pot, which clanged against the floor as he fight began. I threw then the bowl of the pot, which clanged against the floor, but I had nothing else to distract the demon further. He had blades, knives maybe, that sparkled in the light of the fire in a way iron could not. He flashed them quickly and so my family died quickly. He did not clean up or eat the bodies. He sat back down in front of the fire and starred into it. For what seemed like days I lay there, not sure if I was dead or living (because I had certainly been stabbed). After a time, the fire burned low, and the demon got cold. slowly, he curled into a black ball beside the fire and slept. I stood up, my soul stick in hand, and with all my weight, plunged it into his throat. End dream.
