{"id":2290,"date":"2012-02-13T08:30:44","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T13:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=2290"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:11:06","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:11:06","slug":"the-tunnel-by-nat-whilk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/the-tunnel-by-nat-whilk\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tunnel by Nat Whilk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He knew.\u00a0 He knew it before he fell off the log.\u00a0 The dream log, that is — the hollow log.\u00a0 The unconscious always seemed to tip its hat in some way.<\/p>\n

It was just before Jan left.\u00a0 He saw it in her eyes.\u00a0 Or was it the it behind her eyes that seemed to say, “I’m frightened for you. \u00a0If only you didn’t have to sleep.\u00a0 My God, it’s coming back again, isn’t it?”\u00a0 Maybe you call it mindtalk.\u00a0 It doesn’t roll off the lips.\u00a0 It seems to whisper to your eyes, but the mind overhears the conversation.<\/p>\n

It was about the dreams again.\u00a0 The dreams that had more color and perception in them than his own drugged-boozed existence.\u00a0 Now when he had time to think, he imagined himself waterskiing on a sea of booze of the cheap whiskey variety, dipping his cup in the water as he glided along something that was not quite tranquility.\u00a0 Or was he the king of Ski Shit Mountain?\u00a0 Like the guy whose mind is about to take the final dive and everyone knows it but him.\u00a0 Well, the king of Ski Shit Mountain couldn’t smell it even when he took a spill in it.<\/p>\n

But there was always a smell in the log\u2026the tunnel.\u00a0 He could dimly see the light now.\u00a0 The smell of flesh in flames.\u00a0 Intuitively, he knew it was human flesh.\u00a0 Intuitively, it was hell.\u00a0 He had been through this enough times that he could tell it all in detail without his subconscious having to do it in his sleep.<\/p>\n

The smell of burning hair again.\u00a0 The kitchen stove.\u00a0 “Stay away from the damn matches. Don’t strike that, you stupid little shit.”\u00a0 The hairs on the back of his hand disappeared.\u00a0 Like little twigs in a forest fire.\u00a0 His brother Tommy grabbed his hand as if it was something he had always wanted but never \u00a0got.\u00a0 Tommy’s eyes flickered like Jan’s\u2026frightened.\u00a0 “You could have burned your ass up, man.\u00a0 What the hell do you think you are doing?”\u00a0 He loved his brother, but Tommy’s nagging could be a real pain in the ass most of the time.<\/p>\n

The smell, small but pungently sickening, curdled the PB&J sandwich that he had just crammed in his face with a couple of swallows.\u00a0 Before his twelve-year-old brother could scramble back, Kevin left the remains of peanut butter, grape jelly and mangled pieces of bread intermixed and being acted on by stomach acid upon the number twelve on Tommy’s baseball shirt.\u00a0 “You stupid little shit.\u00a0 I ought to kill you\u2026you\u2026you\u2026you\u2026” echoing through the log.\u00a0 Through the tunnel and disappearing in faint whispers.<\/p>\n

The smell of any kind of burning flesh would tumble his gastronomics.\u00a0 By the time Kevin was ten or so, he couldn’t even take the smell of a hamburger frying.\u00a0 “But, Mom, it makes me sick.\u00a0 I want to puke just thinking about it.\u00a0 Please, I just can’t eat it.\u00a0 I’ll puke.\u00a0 I swear I’ll puke right here on the table.\u00a0 I’ve done it before.\u00a0 You know that.”\u00a0 He could see beagle eyes and knew she wasn’t going to make him eat the chopped cow, even if she really believed he would die if he didn’t eat meat.\u00a0 Shit, everybody knew that if he could live entire days scarfing down candy without anything else of real substance, he could live without eating the flesh of other living things.\u00a0 And he didn’t really care if Noah-fresh-off-the-Ark had okayed the eating of animals.\u00a0 He supposed this meant that those who were swallowed in the deluge were vegetarians.\u00a0 That’s what Mr. Hanley, his Sunday School teacher, had seemed to say, as if that was one of the big sins that sent Noah’s boat a’skipping across water filled with dead bodies.\u00a0 With his eyes the size of golf balls, he listened as old man Hanley recounted the boat floating as the bodies bumped and banged against the bow.\u00a0 Kevin’s mind dipped deep enough into the horror that he could see the bloated bodies, eyes wide open in a terror that he imagined to be like the tales of men buried alive.\u00a0 Opening the coffin years later, they would find the scratch marks on the inside lid of the casket.<\/p>\n

Inside the coffin.\u00a0 The fear of suffocating.\u00a0 He felt that same fear even when he was in the dream tunnel as if the flickering light at the end was merely the last crack of light in the pine box before the last shovelful of dirt ended all hopes of escape.\u00a0 Darkness.\u00a0 The only sound the whirring noise of thoughts screaming for freedom.<\/p>\n

The whirring noise.\u00a0 The sound of wind circling in the log, in the tunnel.\u00a0 The only noise, drifting wind.\u00a0 Drifting toward a pinpoint of light.\u00a0 No direction home.\u00a0 The smell of burning flesh growing a bit stronger as the pinpoint grew larger.<\/p>\n

“No more dreams.”\u00a0 He could feel his thoughts shriek.\u00a0 Not this pisser of a dream, anyway.\u00a0 He felt like he was on the merry-go-round.\u00a0 His guts about to spill from the sickness or merry-go-round sickness, if you want.\u00a0 But he always kept coming back to the same spot, the same site.\u00a0 Burning flesh.<\/p>\n

The light was now the size of a baseball, and he was picking up speed.\u00a0 Now a grapefruit like the white blur that hit him square on his temple.\u00a0 Softball with his father.\u00a0 A sissy’s sport, but for a sissy’s sport, the ball sure as hell hurt the same as if it had been a macho ball.<\/p>\n

A watermelon now.\u00a0 The sound of the wind, as usual louder as he floated closer to the light.\u00a0 Ready to be shot out of the log, the barrel.<\/p>\n

The crosslight on the ball of fur at the end of the barrel.\u00a0 Winter in Illinois, and the blanket of snow broken by an occasional clump of grass and a bush or two and there were, of course, the trees.\u00a0 The rabbit sensed the impending doom.\u00a0 It had obviously heard the breaks in the frozen snow as he and his father had stalked their creaturely counterpart.\u00a0 At first it was fun.\u00a0 Then the more they shot and the more the blood ran and the carcasses were skinned, again the smell of flesh burned by buckshot, the less it became a treat to go on the foraging trips through the Illinois woods to shoot living things.<\/p>\n

The little furball was back in sight jigjagging and expecting any moment the blast from the stick that shot fire and made thunder.\u00a0 Kevin had it in the sights.\u00a0 His reluctant trigger finger guided by some primal urge to kill other living things, to make them dead.\u00a0 The butt of the four-ten kicked at his shoulder as it hurled its lead messenger of death toward the hare.\u00a0 This time, however, the hare was the tortoise and the bullet was shaped, amazingly enough, like his own little penis.\u00a0 The little lead pecker penetrated the hindpart of the hare-now-tortoise and the rabbit and the furball jerked and did a total flip and lay writhing in pain.\u00a0 “Good shot, boy.”\u00a0 The old man was smiling, brown spittle dripping slowly out of the corner of his mouth.\u00a0 A real Redman chaw.\u00a0 Kevin had on one of those trips to the woods, at the urging of his father, taken a chew.\u00a0 Against admonitions not to swallow, he dared do that which he was told not to.\u00a0 The rancid tobacco hit his stomach like a chili pepper the size of a banana and about fifteen minutes later came back up the same way.\u00a0 The contents of his stomach emptied on the ground.\u00a0 The old man howled most likely scaring the shit out of anything they might have wanted to shoot that day.\u00a0 Kevin saw red, the red being on the inside of his eyeballs.<\/p>\n

The red was now on the ground.\u00a0 The rabbit was lying on its side shaking.\u00a0 Its eyes were wide open in the crazed stare that one would expect to see in eyeballs that were face to face with death.\u00a0 It was at this time in the boy’s life he first faced stark reality, an absolute truth so to speak.\u00a0 The rabbit turned its head toward Kevin and looked him right in the eye and shrieked an other-worldly howl the likes of which he had never heard before.\u00a0 Blood-curdling does not describe the sound that emanated from the furball.\u00a0 The rabbit’s eye and his eye and their souls joined in an internal bolt, a mental freak-out.\u00a0 Joined, but one was on its way out of temporal reality.\u00a0 The glaze of horror was broken as the old man’s rifle butt smashed what life was left in the furball’s skull.\u00a0 The jaws crushed with the sound of crumbling crackers over soup.\u00a0 The eyes bulged and the hind legs stiffened and the life force was gone.<\/p>\n

That day a piece of Kevin Adams died with the hare.\u00a0 He would never hunt again, something his father attributed to the pussy in him.\u00a0 The eye of the rabbit expanded in his mind to the size of a medicine ball and dropped with the same fierceness of weight upon his concept of verisimilitude.<\/p>\n

The medicine ball of light was now a doorway at the end of the tunnel. \u00a0He could see the clouds now.\u00a0 He was being sucked into bright light.\u00a0 The log was now a wind tunnel.\u00a0 The air was cold.\u00a0 He knew he would shiver if he had something to shiver with.\u00a0 No body.\u00a0 No hands to rub together to get warm.\u00a0 He was not really floating so much as he was being drawn, a type of flying.\u00a0 All he knew was that he could see but not feel physical sensations.\u00a0 He was, and this sounds crazy, he was an eye, a flying eye.\u00a0 He could not see himself as an eye but that’s all he could be unless he was a spirit of some kind.\u00a0 But what was a spirit other than some kind of an invisible eye.<\/p>\n

The eye met blinding light as he was shot forth from the barrel that was once a log.\u00a0 The clouds again.\u00a0 Cumulus and white, like new-fallen snow.<\/p>\n

Descending.\u00a0 The light grows dimmer.\u00a0 Falling through the clouds.\u00a0 Hazy.\u00a0 Shades of winter ice but the eye can’t feel the pain, an eye that sees but cannot feel the cold.<\/p>\n

Slowly the haze fades into blue sky. Below the ocean is breaking against the shore, dragging sand and life back into the sea.\u00a0 Breaking and breaking.\u00a0 The eye watches the breaking and then focuses on the small stick-like forms near the breaking on the sand, on the beach.\u00a0 Bathers on the beach.<\/p>\n

The breaking sea rolls in and rolls out and in and out as fins protrude from the water. They circle.\u00a0 Sharks circling a prey.\u00a0 The eye switches time in his mental rolodex.\u00a0 The fever was hot.\u00a0 It almost killed him.\u00a0 His mother prayed for him.\u00a0 He could hear her murmuring.\u00a0 Kevin opened his eyes.\u00a0 The fins were circling his bed.\u00a0 The water was blood red.\u00a0 Shark snouts jutted out of the water and made pig-like noises.\u00a0 They were hungry.\u00a0 They wanted to feed on the lean young body in the bed.\u00a0 Sweat was drenching the sheets.\u00a0 Kevin began screaming the primal scream of all children, “Help, Mommie!\u00a0 Help!”\u00a0 The bed began to sink and the snouts were now at eye level. \u00a0Jaws turned and crawled up part way to the bottom of his bed.\u00a0 His feet were nestled nearly between the monster’s teeth.\u00a0 It was pulling him into the water.\u00a0 He was not screaming now. \u00a0He was pleading with the shark not to eat him.\u00a0 Its sharp pointed teeth were brown like the sticks on the sand.\u00a0 The bathers were like sticks.<\/p>\n

And the eye was diving slowly toward the bathers.\u00a0 He could still see the sharks, but the water was now full of them, like swarming flies on dead, rancid meat.\u00a0 The water was now blood red.\u00a0 The flying eye was divebombing, divebombing as if down to hell.<\/p>\n

Divebombing toward the bathers, the eye slowly came to a halt a short distance over the bathers, a man and a woman.\u00a0 They were lovers.\u00a0 The eyeball was hovering but not hovering.\u00a0 It was if the eye was blanketing the bathers as they kissed and petted.\u00a0 A man and a woman, and he felt as if he were one with them.<\/p>\n

Kissing, passionate kissing.\u00a0 The man gurgled it seemed.\u00a0 He belched and spat blood in the woman’s face as she withdrew in obvious disgust from the guttural sounds coming from the man.\u00a0 The man’s eyes began to protrude, swelling to the size of quarters.\u00a0 His skin begins to boil and bubble, popping like burning plastic.\u00a0 The girl was pushing back as flames started shooting out of the man like propane burners, blue flames.\u00a0 The man gurgled spitting teeth and other mouth parts into the woman’s face.\u00a0 The man is now an ocean of flames.\u00a0 Through the hissing and crackling of the fire, Kevin could see hair burning in little tufts.\u00a0 First, fingers and toes and noses and ears, then whole limbs and torsos melting and blackening.\u00a0 The burning man’s face was contorted to a grimace and then to a hideous grin, then back to contorted grimace and hideous grin, and the cycle kept repeating itself.\u00a0 At the top speed of a kaleidoscope, a long succession of faces came and went, one flickering after another.\u00a0 Faces and expressions that Kevin had never known except in this nightmare.\u00a0 Kevin felt himself hurtling down an unending lane of faces, decades and centuries and millennia ticking by him, until the speed finally slowed.\u00a0 That was when the eyeballs popped like light bulbs spitting a white, milky substance into the air like a water fountain of death.<\/p>\n

Her hands burned with the eerie feeling of agonizing burn pain.\u00a0 “Christ Almighty, help.\u00a0 Help someone,” she screams as she watched the man go up in what could only be described as a puff of smoke.\u00a0 All gone except for fragments of jawbone, part of an arm and one smoldering foot.<\/p>\n

She tries to get to her feet, but collapses on her back, her face and breast and hands burned in places, frontal places.\u00a0 Her bathing suit partially burned off in the front.\u00a0 She holds her stomach as her abdomen protrudes about a hand’s length and the skin stretches tightly revealing the imprint of a small foot.\u00a0 Like stretched rubber.\u00a0 The foot kicks several times and then dissipates.\u00a0 The woman lays on the beach.\u00a0 Sand ground into her wounds, breathing heavily, not dying but surviving a trip to the furnace.\u00a0 The smell of burning flesh is so rank now that even Kevin the dreaming eye can almost (but not quite) smell it.<\/p>\n

The pull, as always, comes at the end of this scene, the burning time.\u00a0 The log is calling Kevin home.\u00a0 Like a film in reverse, the eye is being drawn backwards.\u00a0 Kevin knows what’s happening.\u00a0 The film is being rewound.\u00a0 He’ll have to do this all over again.\u00a0 He can feel the pain coming.\u00a0 “Stop.\u00a0 Stop.\u00a0 No more.\u00a0 Don’t make me do this.\u00a0 No, dammit.\u00a0 No, dammit, I said, no.”<\/p>\n

“No, dammit, I said, no,” he mumbles in his sleep.\u00a0 He opens his eyes slowly to fuzzy reality.\u00a0 He is home for real this time.\u00a0 Only the ceiling.\u00a0 No clouds here.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2012 Glass Onion Productions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He knew.\u00a0 He knew it before he fell off the log.\u00a0 The dream log, that is — the hollow log.\u00a0 The unconscious always seemed to tip its hat in some way. It was just before Jan left.\u00a0 He saw it in her eyes.\u00a0 Or was it the it behind her eyes that seemed to say, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,200,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2290"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3208,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions\/3208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}