I’ve had a dream recently, the same dream over and over again and each time I think it’s real.
I have a revolver in my hand. It looks like I killed someone. There’s a pool of blood on the floor and splattering over the wall. The room is small with cheap furniture and there’s a cracked washbasin in a corner; like a hotel room you get in 1950s B-pictures where some bum’s holed up with a quart of bourbon and a broken heart.
There’s no bum in my dream, unless that’s who’s on the floor. I can’t recognize the body because there’s a bullet where the face used to be. It’s a woman, unless, maybe a man dressed as a woman. That really would be a fucked-up dream.
I know it’s me, but I look thirty years younger, like when I taught English Literature at an inner-city school. Maybe the body on the floor is one of my kids. I was tempted to murder a few of them.
I don’t teach now, haven’t for twenty years. I tell myself I don’t miss it, that the admin job I have at the local council is good enough. I pay my bills. My wife said I’m not the man she married and took the kids to a new life down South. I miss the children.
The dream ends the same way. I exit the room, slowly take the stairs to the street where the 86 bus is waiting, and make my escape.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 