Dreams without endings

I was in the backseat of a cab where my driver was a minotaur. He wore a newspaper boy's hat, grunted in this corny 'new yawker' accent and apologized profusely for having gotten us lost in the labyrinth that is Terminus traffic. The cabbie 'taur kept trying all these different short cuts that led to increasingly unfamiliar neighborhoods. Along the edge of the passing streets, I noticed a large crowd had gathered as if waiting for the passage of a parade. They stood there with respectful solemnity, heads bowed down and hands folded gently around candles that burned with indifference to the steady fall of rain. It was then when I realized that the rain was falling through them and that the crowd that lined our route were indeed ghosts.

"You remember how to get there, right?" the cabbie 'taur asked, with his bull's eyes framed in the rear view mirror and aimed directly at me.

"I thought you knew...", my answer sputtered under the realization that it wasn't raining, but rather it was that the ghosts were all crying because none of them could ever again know the company of the shadows they wore so callously in life.

"Sorry, pal...", the cabbie 'taur snorted, "I'm not from around here."

Then I recognized an approaching road sign above the endless crowd and in a brief flicker of awareness remembered where I was going and it was...

Dawn thunder rumbled and shook me from the irretrievable depths of the dream's epiphany. Vision bolted open to the room drenched in the white luminescent strobe of lightning. The walls rumbled with the receeding wake of the thunder's passing and settled back. Cascade hiss of rain through the gray haze of morning. Vee muttered and rolled into my arms. Firecracker pounced into my lap, circled around a few times before reluctantly settling into a ball of purring orange fur.

Thought about coffee and eggs and drifted back into sleep.

***

After work, I hit the nearest supermarket, which happens to be all the way out in East Point. It was almost eight o'clock at night and rush hour hadn't let up any. Under the bus shelter I stared down at the single sad brown sack of groceries slumped into a puddle, conning the orbit of fallen leaves (the color of dried sunlight and fresh plums) along with the frozen orbit of gutted out plastic dime bags. In the amber glow of the passing headlights broken glass glistened in the corner of the eye with the promise of distant stars.

Standing in front of me were two men. One was wearing a cheap black suit and a remarkably familiar rain cap. The other wore sunglasses despite the dark and a baseball hat. He was also all in black... but casually so. Both were holding bundles of plastic wrapped fruit that they tried, unsuccessfully, to sell to the traffic waiting at the inordinately red light a few feet away.

Found my attention drifting over the ambient road hum and zoning in on the two men's conversation.

The casual man was doing all the talking while the well dressed man nodded with absent minded politeness, his attention honed in on prospective customers for their wares: "King had a dream."

Here I expected a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead it was some kind of parable.

"The king's dream troubled him so he called for his butler. When the king told the butler about his dream and asked what the butler thought. The butler answered honestly and foretold the king's death. Greatly offended at the interpretation, the king had the butler executed. So he then summoned his vizer out of jail and told the dream to him. The vizer nodded wisely and said..."

"Hang on!" The well dressed man dashed into traffic as it stalled before the row of red lights that just flared up.

The casual man just shook his head and waded into the procession of cars, shoving the boquet of fruit through opened windows or waving them proudly over his head as if signaling for help.

When the two reconvened again, it was much further down the street and the well dressed man was arguing with the casual man about something I couldn't quite hear.

I couldn't help but wonder why the king would ask his butler about his dream in the first place and it was then that I briefly remembered fragments of my own this morning.

Where was I going and why was I scared to go there?

The right bus finally arrived and rolled on through the brain tangle of knotted dream. I got on last and stood despite the vast rows of normally coveted empty seats. What few passengers there were avoided eye contact with each other. Each solemn and silent as ghosts. No one made a sound. No digital walkman soundtrack blaring like some beligerent insect. No one sided cell phone monologues being drill sargeant shouted. No lover's giggle or working woman's sigh. No screech of children, no rambling tale of old man, no flutter of pages. Just the engine's steady roar and the world unfolding out the darkness ahead of us, splashing against our unwavering gaze before vanishing back into oblivion without notice.