About Red Tales

Here's an evolving electronic collection of short prose pieces, with a poem contributed occasionally. Brevity guides. Although sometimes a piece will run to 900 words, most pieces are much shorter. Here one may find erotica, flash fiction, brief observations, and modest improvisations. Another rule is that each piece must have something to do with"red"; at least the word has to appear in each piece functionally. . . . All pieces are numbered and titled, so there's a de facto table of contents running down the rail below, under "Labels" (scroll down a bit). Browse for titles that look interesting, if you like. Thank you for stopping by. Look for some red today, tonight.

"Flaming June," by Frederick Lord Leighton

"Flaming June," by Frederick Lord Leighton

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

274. Rude Dream

Well, that dream spat me out like a wheezing cat--leaving me stranded in a tangle of sheets and angst. Something about a packed subway car full of snarling belligerence. Then came a Hollywood-propped drawing room--walls of books, read draperies--full of accusatory ex-lovers I don't/didn't/mustn't recognize (hence the accusations?). Finally a scuffle of worries, a flurry of muffled voices, a storm of squalid fretting misers who form  a sarcastic chorus singing of me and my failures and low-level fuck-ups. Plus as I try to wallow around toward awake, I can't confront my subconscious mind because it takes such pique and invests it, reaps synaptic profits, and spends them on professional plaid-clad sleep-tormentors, talking statues, and loquacious apples blabbing at a cocktail party full of rapidly moving eyeballs, tremulous eyelids, and sweat glands, and now I push myself through the crack between dreaming and not-dreaming, and am exhausted, which is not the aim of sleep, I would argue, if my mind weren't clogged. Fogged.

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