Pushed, not Leading

A Dream Story by Gabriel Hart

Photo by Tolga Ahmetler on Unsplash

Someone I was forbidden to have let in. Someone parasitical, a hanger-on. Someone overbearing, high-maintenance, and manipulative. Yet I remained by their side, loyal to the oncoming fault. Caught between forces of repelling, magnetic, paralytic. Shady with secrets, and because he trusted me, he told me every last detail.

I did not witness him kill the young woman, but he cornered me to tell me how he did it, every last step, nothing left to my imagination beyond this interpretive abomination. Leading us back to the scene of her initial abduction, carrying me through every subsequent step: her death, her dismemberment, her burning, his surprise and unpreparedness for not exactly every bit of her becoming ash in her last trip in the wind; her teeth and splinters of femur lay in the pile as if bone had eyes, holding him accountable, and now I, just for knowing.

All the while, our psyches now quartered, we were being questioned: where was he in proximity and time to the place she was last seen and where was I with keeping his—now my—story straight.

In parallel: a cartoon sequence further expressing the conundrum, uncertain who was playing who. An anthropomorphic bunny combined with Roger Rabbit and the Pink Panther, whimsically strolling through sceneries of criminy, unaware of its silhouette mocking him. The rabbit shaped shadow demurred into a single black circle bouncing in rhythm with the pink rabbit’s pacing. Follow the bouncing ball, it knows everything the rabbit is leaving behind. The rabbit thinks he’s leading, but the black circle is the one pushing the rabbit to the scene of the crime where everything was being exposed and exclaimed. All mysteries explained except what was inside the void of the black circle, a hole of sacrifice, of negative, of every secret still quivering. The rabbit unaware we could all see the black circle beside him in pursuit of its hubris.

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Gabriel Hart is a writer and journalist from California's high desert. His punk-noir novel On High at Red Tide is out now from Pig Roast Publishing. He's the editor-in-chief of Beyond the Last Estate, a print-only magazine featuring "creative reporting on contemporary literature." He reports daily at Z1077fm in Joshua Tree.