"We Will Buy Your Dreams!"

[jack_babalon]

Times are tough, I don't have to tell you. Just look around at the job starved, the work hungry, a world where a five's your new twenty. The Broke-Ass Heart living off dry hope and dwindling savings. All options boiled down to a flip of one of two choices: hang on or fall off. This is it, folks. Abandon ship and put all this shit up on E-bay already!

Kiss it goodbye. The Secret Toy Store you've been building in your home gutted out and mailed off for paypal cash. A childhood temple ransacked thoroughly of every treasure but its memory. But sooner or later you run out of kitsch-culture memorabilia to hock online. Your hobbies, after all, can only buy you so much time. Now you've begged, borrowed and stole every drop of every penny you could get away with. But the family's not answering the door anymore. Your friends have vanished behind message boxes and unopened e-mails. Nowhere left to go soon but that bottomless Out from which there is no easy way back In.

Caged inside the apartment with the Absence and the Dread too long, you take it outside. Marching through the city at night a one-man armada, trying to burn off the fear with a restless motion forward... and it is only then that you will find it. The place where you can barter your last and most precious gift.

It doesn't matter what city you live in, so long as you live in a city. You'll see it. You'll even pass it by at first without giving it a second thought. A previously abandoned corner of brick and mortar shop. Nothing more and nothing less. But then there in the caged window you'll see the curious neon OPEN blinking defiantly at the hour. It will hold your attention long enough to draw it down towards the hand-painted sign beneath it -

"The Oneiros Brothers
We Will Buy Your Dream$!"

You step in. How could you not? If for the sheer novelty if nothing else.

A bell chimes meekly overhead. The poorly lit room coughs a damp musk of old bookstores and distant grandfathers. The door spring-slams shut with a rattle. Your eyes adjust on a hazy gray flare of bulb diffusing luminescence through the milky shadows above. You are summoned by a lyrical bark to come in, to come in already. Walking down the narrowing aisle of metal shelves, half blind and guided by an instinct foriegn to your experiences. There is a voice in the back of your head warning you not to glance at the inventory you pass. You would do well to listen to it.

When you reach the back of the store you reach a counter. Behind it a small, shriveled gnome weighs you under a nod of his protruding brow. Tanned to an almost mahogany complexion, his face resembles the pit of some massive fruit tethered to an open collar. There is something off about his suit - it never seems to fit him the same way every time you blink. He smells of baked apricots and gun powder. He doesn't say a word but suddenly you know the deal in a flash of dream-logic.

He will buy your dreams from you. In cash no less. Give you a good price too. Not much, but enough to float another month with a roof over your head. Maybe put some food in your belly with some left over for a drink with a pretty lady later if you were lucky.

But here's the thing. Once you sell a dream you can never have it back. You won't even remember you had one... but that is not to say you won't notice its absence. An unknown inspiration will be lost. A trial will end with no verdict. A cut piece of thread left dangling in your thoughts. Only on your deathbed will you recall it in a glance just brief enough to know regret.

Ah... but that's a long way off and for now you'll have a month! A place to bed love and hide from the madness a few weeks longer.

Well, what's it going to be? Once the Oneiros Brothers put their money back in the pocket it doesn't come back out again. Neither does the shop. They ain't got time for bullshit artists and second-guessers. You got yourself a dream for sale or what?

So you do the only thing you can do... you sell them one.

But you make sure you sell them the wrong one!

Not the little corner of happy ending you've carved out in the corner of your notions. Not the writhing beasts of passion that drive you sane. Not the Magick Gun you carry with you only when you sleep. Not the city built of mirrors and places you once lived. No... you sell them HER.

The Punishing Rose, the Monster-Lover who seduces you with words of failure and self-loathing almost nightly. The one who binds you with regrets and lashes the will from the back of your neck with barbwire tendrils drooling out of her kiss. Who lives in the faraway basements and empty fields you were afraid to enter as a child. Who is beautiful in that she is the shadow of all the virtues you could never allow yourself to believe might be yours. Who whispers the darkest secret of them all into your ears - that you were never the knight and only the dragon in the fairy tale of your life.

You count the cash in your hand. Smirk as you watch the lone Oneiros brother wrestle with his prize. She's twice your size out here in 'real life' and easily four times the shop keeper. Too late. A deal's a deal. The old Oneiroi lays a curse on you as he curses you out over a clatter of brittle dreams getting smashed up .

"Take a number, old man!" you snort, already not quite sure what it was you sold to the geriatric prick in the first place. Heading out the door, you wallet up the cash and don't look back. You don't even realize that the store has gone back to being an empty building once you're out. You don't even realize you were in one. All you need to know is you've got another month in the life raft.

That and something else... something that weighed on your shoulders that seems suddenly absent as you make your way home.

Comments

[mindcontrol23.livejournal.com]

William Burroughs taking a deep shot of Lovecraft straight into his vein. Nice.

[catwalk.livejournal.com]

what a great way to describe it... coooool!

[catwalk.livejournal.com]

oh, there are so many of my dreams i would have paid the $25
to have that Temple fellow in the ad depict for me....