75 - A nightmare.
joneworlds@mailbox.org

I  have  not  been   feeling  well  lately.  Aches
everywhere,   especially    my   head.   Ibuprofen
helps.  Although  moving   around  also  seems  to
help. Even rocking left and right when I sit seems
comforting.

Also I have bad dreams. The other night, I dreamed
I was back at old Pierce's farm, loading something
onto  Pete's  truck.  There's a  bunch  of  little
gnomes following me around, but something is wrong
with them. Pieces are falling off. A hand, an arm,
an ear,  a jaw.  Then I go  around to  the flatbed
trailer, and I notice that  the cab and the bed of
the truck are packed solid  full of dirt. And Pete
has changed too. He is an old man, and his head is
swelled up to twice its  normal size. And his feet
are somehow attached to  the ground with all these
red threads. And  all this is so  upsetting to me,
that I wish I could just wake up.

And then  I do, or so  I think. At the  foot of my
bed I see another gnome,  bald and pale, small and
misshapen. It scrambles up on  the foot of the bed
and starts crawling up the blanket towards me. I'm
panicking because I can't move a muscle except for
my  head.  And then,  it  suddenly  occurs to  me:
things  from  all my  dreams  can  follow me  back
up. Knowing that is about as terrifying a thing as
I've ever known. But I can't even scream.

I turn my  head, and by the side of  the bed I see
there are four women  standing there. There's Beth
with her hands tied together  and an exit wound on
her forehead. Ellie with  her neck broken and both
arms  chewed off  at the  shoulder. A  young woman
with  an alpaca  behind  her on  a  leash. And  an
extremely old  woman who is laughing  and pointing
at  me.  She throws  a  pie  and  it lands  on  my
face. Tastes like raspberry. The gnome is up on my
face now, licking what's left  of the pie. I close
my eyes. I hear a strange sound.

Then I wake up for real,  and I am finally home in
the  back of  the motor-home  where I  belong, all
alone. Even the gnomes that usually sleep here are
all gone this morning, and  this seems very odd to
me.  And  I  think  I  see  a  shadow  behind  the
curtains,   of   someone  standing   outside   the
window. The shape of a stooped old man in a hooded
cloak. But he moves off and goes away.