Nap Series

I wake up to a room that's not the same, it is grosser. Like a landlord painting a thick coat of glossy white over a cockroach on the wall, or the way each door hinge is cracking white with careless paint and when you run your fingers along the wall you can feel loose individual strands of some old tenant's long hair trapped beneath the most recent layer. I can't help but think, you are too shiny and was the room always this sick green? Every half hour I wake up to the sounds of dogs fighting and snapping at each other in English, they are saying things like: why are you doing this to me, and I don't know you started it and devolve into little bitchy comments punctuated with howls and ripping. I roll over and ignore them every time, when you try to separate them you only get yourself punctured and rabid too. Now I can only dream in shitty lowball shot-on-video horror movies where the blood is fake and the intestines are real, but twisted frankensteined, real animal guts under simulacra of human skin. In one of them there is a guy and a girl, and I am me, I am the main character, and I am in love with the guy and he is in love with me but we haven't said anything, and I can't get rid of the third girl, who is obsessed with him and openly hates me, because I am too nice. But she scares me, and she breaks the things I give him, his bracelet explodes tiny purple glass beads everywhere when she pulls it too hard to get a look at it, when I try to collect the beads she bites and threatens me with my dad's big hunting knife, until she cuts me deep by accident and I push her outside and barely lock her out. She screams like her lungs can hold forever and beats down the door and I am terrified, holding my cut until I wake up. The guy doesn't do anything of course he doesn't believe me that she would do that and I am always ultimately on my own isn't that the real fear? And how did she get into my apartment? I must have left the door open. maybe for him. He comes in with a robot on wheels he invented to follow me around playing me music and I am touched he thought of me at all and that's another horror fuck I am trapped in sentimentality. In another I am at swim practice and slowly everyone leaves and I am the only one left and all of a sudden I am surrounded by men in their thirties white men with shitty beards who descend upon the pool like crocodiles coming back to the riverbank after they missed a strike at a gazelle--in this one the horror is awkwardness and moreover potential energy. The feeling of being drunk and hurt around men you don't know very well who promise you cocaine and trips to montauk, who let you ride their electric scooter and never take you serious when you joke you'll steal it. Sick turnover in my stomach and slippery bodies in water, nothing happens before I wake up sweating and terrified, and of course I am fast but I am never quick enough to outswim a crocodile.