A Midsummer Nightmare

A photo by this author

Some years ago, in the middle of a strong heat wave hovering our huge megalopolis I woke up shortly after a vivid dream,which I now wonder  whether it was a premonition, a nightmare or a good omen for so many other living beings? Here goes what I did hear while dreaming, as a strong hallucination:

You woke up from a profound sleep and saw your hands were then a exquisite pair of fascinating orchids.

You went out walking through your giant now deserted city, enthralled and very proud for being at least partly orchids.

Yet, knowing how ephemeral they are, you feared their annihilation. To deal with such a dread, from your arms have stuck out fresh green leaves, ensuring you that, when the orchid flowers would perish away, the plant as a whole might remain. Someday new pretty orchids would certainly sprout again from your own body.

Orchids, however, need tree branches as support to keep living. Both arms jumped out from your trunk, then changed into huge baobabs. Those so pretty flowers had from thence on survival assured. Astonished, after taking a look at the now freed living beings which just before had been your arms and hands, you resumed walking adrift.

Some blocks farther, all your hair fell at once to the ground, each one of your hairs becoming a mighty earthworm which began piercing, melting, and changing asphalt and concrete into pure earth.

Your left leg's skin became thick like fish scales. This limb detached from the your hip as a huge anaconda. Overwhelmed by dread, you imagined it would devour your whole body up, but the reptile didn't even pay any attention to your being, creeping in the opposite direction of your hurried coward escape.

Both your ears became exuberant butterflies, vividly colorful.

Your right leg went away too, turned into a pretty iguana couple.

You always thought you'd never lose your noble brain, "Creation's climax", but all of a sudden a hole was opened on your head's top, on place of infancy's fontanel, and soon all your skull's content was felt as slipping over your skin as lousy slugs, cockroaches and roundworms.

Notwithstanding all this, you still kept on thinking and feeling every event with cruel, intense voluptuousness.

From your opened navel, viscera were finally able to jump out. Your bowels have assumed a queer and grotesque shape of a weed which you always had loathed. They fell to the ground, took roots, and thrived on. From your spleen sprang up a bull that began to graze there on side of whatever was still remaining of your body.

Your pancreas jumped up into the air, changed into a noisy hen; your kidneys into two bats. Also your liver flew away, now a big vulture, Prometheus's bird as it is recalled, who smiled ironically as seeing your still alive remains, told you good-bye, and headed fast to the Caucasus.

Your bladder bloomed as a huge mushroom.

You lost the face as a huge turtle occupied the whole of your skull. Before this, your eyes had already flied away as two firefly's clouds.

Still wandering throughout your city's huge desert, you remained still overwhelmed by a ruthless ecstasy.

Your spinal column hurried away to the sea, changing into countless octopuses, squids, jellyfish, lobsters, crabs, shrimp.

Your breath stopped, since both lungs became a pair of copulating dolphins.

Your heart was not able to change into any worthier being than a lonely single housefly

Almost all of what still remained of your skin became then huge clumps of foliage, and of your muscles, dozens of small lizards.

Nonetheless, you were stil staying alive, intensely and excruciatingly feeling time and things.

Only when your male genitals lastly freed took flight from you, turned into a never seen and so splendid owl, were you able to see that there wasn't any more place for you on Earth.

You were finally dead.

Extinct.

"Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed."                                Mahatma Gandhi