the evil genie who lives in my house
February 9th, 2009 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I come home to find a giant crowd of people waiting outside of my house. Ariana runs up to me to say that we’re having a party here, and that I’m late! I hurry inside and try to find something to make for so many people, but I don’t think I have any food. People pour into the house and start mingling and exploring. Someone walks near the evil genie’s cave, and the genie throws a dart at him that sticks into his wrist. Aghast, he asks me what that was all about. I don’t really know, but I don’t particularly want the genie throwing any more darts at the guests, so I start to board up the room that leads to the genie’s cave, but the genie throws a dart into my arm! I demand him to explain himself. He says that we can either go to the hospital immediately and get our arms amputated or the poison will envelop us and our souls will be slaves to him for eternity.
Not wasting any time, I run into the kitchen and grab a long, serrated bread knife. To the horror of those around me, I make two deep angled cuts into my arm around the dart hole such that a triangular prism of bloody, poisoned flesh falls off my arm into the sink. The wound doesn’t start to hurt until I’m done with the knife and I am covered in blood, as is the knife, sink, and floor. I pack a paper towel soaked in antiseptic into the hole and tape the wound closed. The other person wounded by a dart understands what is at stake, and takes the knife to set about cutting off his wrist. He wraps a string tightly around his finger to slow blood flow, and his arm becomes clear like it is made of plastic. I can see the veins and arteries and tendons inside. I wonder if the internet will know how to improvise an arterial clamp.
3:28
January 29th, 2009 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I wake up with the feeling that something is missing from inside my mind. It seems to be my sense of time – I concentrate really hard, but still can’t tell what time it is at all. I look at my watch, and it is 3:28. That doesn’t make sense, I realize, because I’m not wearing a watch.
prophetic fragments
November 30th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I am being chased on my bike by a group of hunters in a camouflaged pickup truck. I can go faster than them if I sprint as fast as I possibly can manage, but I don’t think I can keep the pace up for long. My legs burst into flame. I’m not sure if this is a really good thing or a really bad thing.
A shadowy, many-legged form is hovering in front of me. It says something I don’t understand.
I am in a war, but I don’t know over what or between who. There is a rifle in my hand, and I am wearing a dark wool uniform. I can’t see far through the fog, and in every direction there is mud and the sound of gunfire. I start to walk towards the sound of a large explosion. The icy mud beneath my boots becomes a field of the innumerable decomposing faces of dead soldiers, and with each step their skulls crack and squish beneath my boots. The ground is so thick with blood and cerebrospinal fluid that my boots get sucked underground, and I have to proceed in bare feet. I light a cigarette, and moments later I realize that the fingers holding the cigarette are no longer attached to my hand, but are on the ground a few feet away. One of the faces in the ground tells me my feet smell like brains. I apologize, then lie down to smoke another cigarette with my remaining fingers.
hang gliding, continued:
October 6th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I am at a hang glider/pilot training school. A man walks up screaming continuously in monotone. He says something like, “I WAS A NAVY PILOT A LONG TIME AGO AND I USED TO FLY LOTS OF PLANES AND I WE WOULD FLY AROUND FOR HOURS AND HOURS AND I WANT TO FLY A PLANE I WOULD LIKE INSTRUCTION AND TO RENT A PLANE”, as he walks, determined, straight towards the small instructional plane. He is wearing an astronaut suit. As soon as he reaches the plane he starts to take off, and the instructor only barely has time to get in.
For some reason I am clinging to the top of the plane in my hang glider as it takes off. He flies around for a while doing loops, figure-8s, and spirals. The instructor is apologizing the whole time, “I’m sorry, they usually perform better than this!”. At the top of one of the loop-de-loops I finally let go. A woman screams. I have nearly no airspeed, but soon am plummeting towards the ground very fast. I recover from the stall and pull up just in time to feel the ground scrape against my toes, but am too ambitions in my attempt to gain altitude. A gust of wind from behind reduces my airspeed and again I find myself quickly approaching the ground. I don’t have enough room to recover, and fall the 30 feet directly onto the pavement below.
Batman is within us all
October 6th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I have acquired what turns out to be a few extremely valuable books at the rotary auction without realizing it. Their worth is brought to my attention to a distant family friend during a party we are having at our Victorian mansion. He tries to buy them for a few dollars, then tries to sexually molest some party guests when that fails. I know I must get the books to our other mansion, across the city, so I dash up to the hang-glider launching pad on our roof. He realizes my intentions and chases me. As I grab a hang glider and hurl myself over the precariously over-hung launching pad into the midnight air, I can see him behind me fumbling with a more complicated flying device.
The glider is unnecessarily long, pitch-black, and shaped like a bat wing. I am almost invisible in the night as long as I stay away from street lights and tall buildings. Behind me, my nemesis has finally figured out how to work his jet-powered hang glider and is quickly gaining on me. As he approaches my glider, he turns around for a second to adjust the jets and loses sight of me. Panicking, he pulls up suddenly to get a wider view of the area. I am invisible clinging to the top of a speeding bus. As I let go my momentum carries me up to the roof of my second mansion. Figuring it out, my nemesis begins his rapid, over-powered descent and the glider explodes a few meters from the landing pad, throwing me against the floor skidding towards the opposite edge of the roof. I catch a railing just in time and slip off the roof so that I am dangling by just a few fingers; the flaming wreckage of the jet-powered glider tumbles off the precipice over my head.
I pull myself up and, brushing off some dust and dirt that had accumulated on my suit-vest, wonder why the roof hadn’t been swept that evening. I step over the charred, shapeless corpse of my adversary and descend into my mansion.
this is a dream about airplanes
September 6th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I am with my uncle Brent. He promised that we could go flying in one of his airplanes sometime, so we head out to his hanger one afternoon. He has two planes: one is a tiny, single-engine two-seater dwarfed by his second, a gigantic, twin jet engine luxury corporate/military fighter beast. I point at the bigger of the two, “So … can we fly that one?” He looks kind of stressed out, but agrees.
On the runway we are joined by a large group of airport tourists who want to learn about flying. They climb in, filling every spare inch in the cabin. The tour guide is flying the plane. We take off and do some gentle turns, then he demonstrates what it is like to crash by pointing the nose straight towards the ground. We careen helplessly for a few minutes, the ground rushing at us at hundreds of miles per hour. When the nose is only a few inches above the ground he pulls back on the controls and guides us safely back into the air.
I worry that, with so many passengers and such a large plane, Brent will have a very large fuel bill before the end of the day.
this is a dream about Lizzie
September 6th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I am with Lizzie. “I’m sorry that I’ve been dreaming about you so much,” I apologize, “I really don’t know why that is. I guess it’s kind of weird.”
“Yeah. It is.” She looks really weirded out.
it seemed like an alright thing to do at the time
August 22nd, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
My cousins and I kill a bunch of people in their house because it seemed sort of appropriate at the time, like they would go to a better place, or maybe just because we didn’t really know if we could and wanted to find out. We later realize that it was a really bad idea and that we’ll all be thrown in jail for life if we are caught.
We try to clean up the blood, but it takes a really long time. I am wiping off their porch with a rag soaked in alcohol, and keep coming across fingerprints of mine made in blood. I don’t remember getting my hands particularly bloody or making lots of fingerprints on their porch, but I am really worried that I’ll miss one in my attempt to hide all the evidence.
We realize that everything is covered in fingerprints, and the only thing we really could do is to just burn the whole house down to get rid of them. None of us really want to be arrested for arson, though, either. We decide to deal with the fingerprints on our own bodies by covering ourselves in a waxy, flammable substance and burning it, and any lingering fingerprints, off of our skin. Somebody I don’t know lies down in a cast of wax and lets us cement him in. We promise to put out the fire once all the fingerprints are gone. We light the fire, and he starts to scream. It is out of control, the wax is much more flammable than we had planned. He tries to get out, but he is stuck. I try to smother the flames, but they are too hot to get close to. There isn’t really anything we can do anymore, so we walk away. The man screams in agony for a little while longer.
this is excessively symbolic
August 20th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; one comment
I am riding my bicycle down a forest trail and stop to adjust something. Two women, one younger and one older, approach me on the trail. “Want to fly with me?” the younger of the two asks. I attach a rope she hands me, which is presumably attached to her airplane, to my bicycle. I try riding down the trail one way while she tries flying the other way, which is not very productive.
“I think you need to get off your bike for this to work,” she suggests. I do so, and she holds me around the waist as she is suspended from her airplane, which seems to be some sort of powered hang-glider. We take off between the trees, but quickly ascend above the canopy. We fly around, up and down, in circles, loops, figure-8s, over trees, beaches, meadows, and ocean. I am blown away by how thrilling it is.
Later she, her mom, and I all go to the clinic to wait for her to be drug tested.
they will make us explode
August 20th, 2008 by Kris Skotheim; no comments
I’m living in a dormitory, of sorts. There’s a big party going on in the main room, and we get points for breaking things. I grab a pool cue and slide it along all the tables, knocking countless glasses full of prepared cocktails to the floor and scoring countless points. I notice a flashing sign near the ceiling that has an airplane and a person and a symbol which means fire. I don’t know what that means, but there doesn’t seem to be a fire in the building, so I just keep on breaking things. I break so many drinks that I get really drunk and stumble a lot as I try to go upstairs to my room.
Levi (my roommate from the UW dorms) is in the common room looking really freaked out by something. He tries to say something, but I leave to go back downstairs. I see through the window an airplane painted as a firetruck landing in the front yard. I realize that I am really drunk, and should go hide so that the firemen don’t arrest me for underage drinking. I run back up to where Levi is, and he stops me to ask, “Hey – do you remember that beam being there before?”, pointing to a new structural element in the room. This thought sobers me up instantly – it must mean that something is happening in the room above the new beam which required the room have additional support, and only something really, really devious could possibly require that much support! I run for the exit, completely freaked out, but am stopped by a fireman.
“Hey kid,” he calls to me, blocking the stairwell. “I’ve got a story to tell you. When I was a boy, I remember … ” this is frustrating, so I yell at him, “I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO SAY!” and try to push past. He stops me, then makes a deliberate effort to form the words, “No! No, I’ve got a story to tell you, I said.” He is clearly very drunk. Some other people come into the stairwell to discuss our dormitory’s predicament. After a lot of effort, the fireman explained that when he was young, he noticed weird things happening in the dormitory he was living in. One day, it became apparent that if he didn’t pay an evil scientist $14 each day, the scientist would make him explode. The same thing was going to happen to us, but the price has increased to $17/day on account of inflation. In the doorway, I notice splatters of blood amidst the rubble.