Weekend at Sofia's: Waking Dream

Dylan found himself walking beneath gray skies; silvergranite vapor, like a curtain of obscurity that threatened  to break into a downpour any moment. Beneath which were the twisting corridors of urban streets. A river of  asphalt dividing sidewalk shores. There were no cars in  sight, but he knew the traffic would swallow him entirely  without a second thought if he so much as stepped into  that stream of solid tar. Instead he wandered the  concrete coast, giving fellow travelers wide berth on the  path.  

And the maze stretched on and on but seemed to curve  just to the left of the horizon. Always bordered by vertical  slopes. Unassailable building sides with no doors and no  windows, whose canyon reaches formed uncertain  layers of neon strata and weathered graffiti. 

 So preoccupied he was gazing skyward, he didn’t notice  his collision course with someone in front of him until  he’d already rebounded off them. He stumbled back with  a mouth full of apologies that spilled out of his lips in  mutter butter of ill-formed syllables. Incomplete  offerings. A strangled whimper that only seemed to  summon the crowd that gathered to gaze upon his  ineptitude. He felt himself melt under their gaze. He  shrank under their wordless judgment, paralyzed in place  while distant muzzles tilted down in a mixture of disdain  and amusement. 

A cacophony of smirking snouts and cellphone cyclops’ leering over him. Hands on their knees with sneering  jaws broken by hideous laughter. Drinking in his mute terror. Drowning out his heartbeat. While the awful  weight of their gawking stares pushed down on him as  he stumbled over the canyon cracks in the sidewalks.  

He had to get away. Evade their scornful glances. Get to  safety. It took all his effort to pull himself free of the spot.  His shoes peeled off his feet and dissolved into the street.  Lapped up by the hungry concrete. Its prickle teeth bit  his heels and stabbed his toes as he pushed through a  forest of long legs and struggled to reach the other side.  

A house on a hill. A distant objective he had to reach. An  escape from the terrible trepidation that hung over him.  That lurking, predatory dread. A storm whose wet waters  would sweep him away in the thirsty gullies of the side  walk. Drag him away. Down, down, into the drains with  the litter and the refuse and the brackish deep and the  terrible things that swam under the water’s churning  skin.  

He felt the rain drops on the nape of his neck and he  strained for a door knocker just beyond reach. The iron  rust of it licked his palms but slipped from his grip.  Further and farther the more he strained for it. The  doorknob wouldn’t turn for him. Wouldn’t even jiggle.  His grip was too weak. A humid petrichor beaded on his  whiskers while the pumice sky grumbled hungrily. He  cried into the rising gale and pounded and pounded on  the door not to be left out in the rain. Not to be washed  away. Not to be lost and forgot about.  When the door opened like a yawning chasm – and he  spilled forward into a brightness. A blinding light that  snatched him away just as the snarling squall, the  hurricane fangs of the wind snapped at his back.  

---

Dylan jolted wake with a sputtering wheeze. His sapphire  eyes blinked away the bleary blighted blur of slumber  staining his sight. Tried to blink away the mirage-mess of  mingling concepts from his dreamscape. The awful  grainy feeling of gray water that dripped his thoughts,  evaporating in the cool morning air. He rubbed at his  eyes, using his knuckles to quash obstinate visions and  knead his aching eye sockets. Shadows of a memories of  muddled terror. Emotional threads in a mural of thought  fast fading from his mind. He was glad to chase away  those Creepy and weird and very unwelcome. Though,  his efforts were undermined by the abrasive grasp of a  sunbeam piercing through a curtain in a distant window. A solar stare from a distal star whose inquisitive gaze spanned the depths of space just to inconvenience him. 

He groaned and rolled over into the comfortable warmth  of the doggy and buried his face into an patch of fur. It  was soft and thick and cozy with familiar snoozy sorts of  smells. Much nicer than the vestiges of a memory of a  nightmare. Of city ozone and the gruesome geosmin of  broken earth. He steeped in the organic warmth of a  friend nearby. Soaked in the body heat of someone  whose face was familiar. Sucked in a breath, holding it in  his lungs and willing himself to calm the heck down. It  helped. Marginally. Since being partially buried in woof-fields caused his thoughts to flash towards being cheekily  compressed by a similarly cheeky canine. That got him  worked up in an entirely different sort of way, so he  groaned and rolled over, covering his eyes to avert the  stare of the sun judging him for being all wiggly in the  wake of a nightmare.  

He felt himself sink into the softness of dog fluff and let  a sigh flutter from his lips. Great. Nightmares. Juuuust what he needed right now. The weekend was already  starting on a high note. Speaking of high notes he was  going to have to ask Sofia to turn down her ceiling fan. It  was achingly loud. Yet far away. Too far even. …And the  wrong pitch for a fan.  

The rabbit pulled himself up from the soft of the doggy  fur, eeped, and tip-top-tumbled backwards under the  direction of his own momentum. He’d kind of expected  to have a pillow or something to grab onto – but the  slope of the pretty-puppy precipice he had nestled into  was not a particularly kind angle. What began as a slide  evolved into roll; and head-over-heels lad tried to grasp  at nearby fur to keep himself from falling off the bed; to  no avail as he slid right off the slope and beyond with a  squeak of surprise. Over the edge and down towards  the–  

FLUMPH! 

The bed? He was expecting a face full of carpet or a  clothing hamper but here he was on a familiar mattress  Dylan blinked a moment as he bounced on the soft  covers experimentally. Definitely bed. More like a  padded plateau it felt like now that he was considering it  more seriously. He was going to have to petition the  puppy for her supplier because he definitely wanted a  mega-scale mattress when this was all said and done. It was simply enormous. He turned to Sofia to ask if she  was awake and - OH!... Oh…That explained it…Well, it looked like this was going to be a very eventful weekend indeed.

(After some minor delays, part one is complete! Part two shall hopefully be upon us later this year <3)