Appleton Notes; and Christmas Day

You know you have been eating well beyond your normal capacity when just the taste of the toothpaste in the morning kicks in another quick and queasy round to the restroom; of course, it is also one of the few times of year when flatulence can smell like burning metal and people are not rushed to the Emergency Room.

Dickens, he had it right with that business about the bit of meat in the belly causing phantasms in your dreams. Scrooge, he saw ghosts when he dreamt. Last night, in the wee hours of Christ’s birthday, after a nightcap of pizza and stout, I saw midgets.

There were four of them, quadruplets, three identical females and one quite similar male. We were all, seemingly, lovers, though the small man tended to mostly sleep through the carnival acrobatics of my evenings with the three wee ladies.

We lived in a large black place, a metal mansion of many rooms that was strangely warm, strangely, like a womb – we were moist and fed and slept like babies wrapped in our soft webbing of 20 limbs. I dreamt of three days and nights with these, my friends, my lovers, three days and nights of feasts of alien meals, endless energy, and kinetic, bounding love. I was at home and happy with them like I’d never been.

I never knew their names, but for our last few minutes together I called them Snow!, Star!, Santa! and Silly!, the three young women and the man in that order, because that was what they saw, each in turn, late on the third night, when we all raced to the dark sliding doors of the master bedroom in our black mansion.

Santa had come to take them away, unfortunately. The suit was the same, and the beard, but the sleigh was a transport to someplace out of my mind, my mansion. Three days were not long enough. I hated to be greedy, but I felt nothing but great loss at the departure of my miniature, loving quartet. How could I just begin to feel a lifetime of love, only to have it depart in three days? I needed them forever, my angels. Together, the five of us, everything in our warm, dark womb made sense. It was then that I realized I was lucid dreaming – and without them, I knew I would wake up. I would be back in my friend’s borrows bed in the dark cellar of his home, in a loving enough womb of a different kind. I had no reason to feel sad about such a nice awakening. Alas, once you exist in a mansion of many rooms that holds you as only your primary womb held you when your life was nothing but dreams and a bath of wet heat and love, this before you could know that it would be your first and only true joy, true peace, true comfort, this before existence and realization began their steady entropy, you can not awaken any way other than wounded.

I will have some cinnamon cake and coffee. It isn’t the womb, or my mansion, but it isn’t the worst way to wake up on Christmas Day.

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