The Midnight Dreamers

At dusk the darkness creeps across the destitute canvas of the sickly sky like phantom fingers. The dreamers hold their breath as the dying rays of the incensed orb rapidly fade. Time punctuates every throbbing heart in this era of dread and the chaos of imagination rumbles like thunder in every mind. The children in bed cover their heads with sheets of lead. The cancerous x-rays cascade down from the ionosphere as the last light lingers, but their poisonous tentacles fail to penetrate the cold, heavy blankets tightly wrapped around the younglings. At least they can dream. In a brief reprieve from the sea of misery, their thoughts gently roll amongst fluffy marshmallows for clouds and interlacing rainbows floating in a vibrant stretch of blue. The curiosities of the kids rapidly lead them to beyond the golden horizon and into a world diametrically opposite from their own. There is no poverty of happiness in the direction that they venture toward.

During the daytime, it is a different story altogether. A great sadness deeply saturates the skin of the waking populace, trudging along like zombies from shack to factory, factory to shack, over and over again. There is immense poverty here but also sequestered wealth. At the end days of an industrial revolution, the laborers are merely a step beyond an existence of dismal slavery. There is no savings to look forward to. Only mind-numbing repetition day in and day out. The adults are no longer able to dream. The governing party has driven the populace with an iron fist and dark deception is in abundance of what really happened to cause the sudden and irreversible decay of Earth. The planet's manganese core now emits deadly radiation as the ozone dangles like cob-webs against the thick, polluted atmosphere.

The only hope lies in the minds of the children. They are the future cosmonauts. They will guide humanity out of the misery and into a new dawn. But not on this planet. It's a lost cause for poor, wasted Mother Earth. No, the children's scion will find shelter on the quartz-encrusted heloid satellite of Jupiter, called Ganymede. Of course, they would have to come up with a way of transporting the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of remaining ocean water of Earth to their new home if they hoped to survive. But survive they would.

The years melt into decades, and then the kids who are no longer children, revolt, and overthrow the oppressive reign of tyrannical rule. A century roles on by and now the kids have developed the appropriate technology to escape from the toxic inferno that has become the planet they deem 'wEarthless.' They cast aside their lead-lined blankets and depart in there floating cities to begin their 26 year journey to Jupiter’s largest moon. For the first time, they find themselves as extraterrestrials sleeping in warm beds with soft, soporific pillows and sheets. They resume their dreaming at night. No longer are their dreams fantasies, but instead, they take the form of ideas and hopes that will help them bring in the dawn of a new age.

Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX

THE toxic smoke emitted from the devil pit suffocates the pallid light of the infernal hydrogen orb. It peers down with its billion blinding eyes from a hazy vermillion canvas. The shadows become ever more menacing as they elongate with the departure of the sun. Doctor Shnagra Vadlinger IX pries open his sustenance chamber with his warped claws for hands. The eroded enamel of his jagged teeth appears as cutting devices that some hell-bent assassin might use. The rusty colors of essential fluids cake the bicuspids of his maxilla. If this was his smile, I would hate to see his sneer. 

The burnt floor beneath us shifts under cataclysmic seismic pressures and my feet lose purchase from the wasted earth. Vadlinger IX callously reaches out to envelope me with his many oaken arms and legs on my inevitable return-trip. Then I’m tossed like yesterday’s trash into an ancient midnight-black oblong box. My skull cracks on impact and Sir Homunculus escapes using his tiny malformed legs. I endure a sharp negative 82g free-fall into the devil pit as Vadlinger IX’s heaving belly rhythmically moves in tune to the horrendous cackle of delight, brought on by my timely demise.

In the grey-goose universe of banal bourgeois, I was one of the most maverick of semi-sentient beings. My hallucinogenic and vicarious re-creations of what never was, seemed to pervade my marginally-mundane mind-machinations. For this reason, I was now here: within a Stone Mason’s coffin, with a cracked cranium, and catapulted by Dr. Shagra to beyond the event horizon of the devil pit. There would be no reversal to this fate. No second chances or slow romances neither. I was down for the count and in it for the long haul to do Hades dirty-work.