2:22 AM

The near-spring temperatures faded with the sunlight and we had some rain. So the stoop was no good. I went out on the back porch and lit a cigarette.
I had to get up.
I awoke sweaty and chilled from a fevered sleep of strange dreams.
I dreamt of space aliens coming for me. They came screaming down the sky in what looked to me for all the world like a giant, flying river boat; a huge craft with a spinning wheel at its side like a monstrous carnival ride flaming through the night. It was a harbinger of worse things to come.
I got over that and flopped again into a paranoid dream of the walking undead. I kept seeing people I knew and I needed their help but, when I grabbed them and spun them around, their eyes were lit with a maniacal, bloodthirsty light. Vampires.
I found myself wondering then: If vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors, how do they know when their face is dirty or even if their hair is combed properly?
The door opened and she came out to catch me smoking.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m thinking about my dreams,” I told her. “My dreams are visions.”
She looked at the glass in my hand. (We had spent a few hours, in our Down Time, silently arguing over the ever-diminishing remnant of a bottle of vodka.)
“Looks to me like most of your dreams are in that High-Ball glass,” she said. “And you’re spilling them.”
I reached down, instinctively, to wipe the liquid off my leg. I realized then that I was wearing draw-string pajama pants, a tee shirt and my most worn and tattered herring-bone jacket.
“Well, yeah,” I said, still wiping, “they’re my dreams.”
She just nodded slightly and went back inside and I didn’t have the words to stop her. I knew that, once I made it back inside, she’d already be asleep.
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I’d spent too many mad, tortured nights wishing her back into my life and now, I didn’t know what to say to her.
What I wanted was to chase her inside, lay her out across the mattress and, not to sound overly crude- even though it’s very difficult to manage with the vodka swimming in my veins- throw my penis into her and then jump in after it. I wanted to ravish her, attack her, to kiss her lips wildly, to whisper and nibble shapeless words across her bare skin and teach her as many lessons as I could muster from my meager bag of tricks.
But I stayed where I was and thought some more about my dreams and wondered what these visions could mean.
“God Damn!” I said aloud to the empty night that had filled the back yard around me.
I had just remembered that it was Valentine’s Day.