Reverse In Occurring Nightmare Recurring

The smell lingers.

Did the recurring nightmare end?

Gentle hyperventilation is relief when heard

given the lurid silence beheld before I awoke.

My child soul’s forlorn wail choked

in vocal cords welded closed by

abhorrent, inevitable age gazing

back from dusty mirror jail.

A tear-marked pale face straining its

inaudible terror to no avail,

failing to conjure even whispers.

White hair, beard wisps seethe and

descend beneath the mirror’s edge.

Canyon years etch my ancient frame,

alien aberrations to youth betrayed.

Wretched future and petulant fumes are

sole companions in the barren dining room

where card partners have partaken quiet exeunt.

Horrified pursuit brings me here,

eluding the death-scented dreadnought

monster squawking threats, taunting

with magnificent technicolor

wings and beak but bloodshot eyes.

The gawking glutton munches someone—

stranger or relative, impossible to discern.

They’re distance-blurred, crunched to nonexistence

above where bestial feathers brush vaulted heights.

Abominable Rainbow Chicken.

An apt phrase but absurd,

not capturing its malicious nature

obscured by an uncertain odor—

perhaps that of bastardized nostalgia.

The maternal farmhouse scoured of usual accents:

Sam, Boots, or Brandy sprawled on the left-side couch,

Judge Judy and Penn State cohabitating the antique TV,

squat bookshelves, the ridged felt chair and ottoman

separated from Grandpa’s fuzzy-blanket-draped,

black-tape-mended, red leather recliner by

the end table pedestal-shrine to a never-

let-empty root beer barrel supply.

All that expected, yet all that denied

when I arrive from the dining room.

At the sticky red-and-white, Santa-speckled,

plastic checkerboard tablecloth,

Aunt Gail plays Set Back with a face

turned and blocking her opponent’s.

I don’t understand the vacancy of Grandpa’s favorite spot,

the rocking chair where he often watched us,

drawled garbled wit in an unlabeled raspy dialect.

The chair should guard the door to the basement steps.

Instead, an unfamiliar reflecting glass not yet

faulty in casting perceptions so I pass

to the cramped kitchenette-foyer

where in boyhood I was Grandma’s shoefly pie assistant,

where on a stool she’d smoke cigarettes endlessly,

listening to a weathered radio which announced Kennedy’s fate.

I know I’m dreaming because I don’t stash

my shoes on muddy newspaper ads as the house mandates.

Above the trashcan and microwave hang

flannel multitudes from coat hooks.

The wooden door croaks shut

to the stuck state from which I yanked it open,

alone just before the smell.

This is a revision of a poem I wrote in Spring 2020 for my Linked Forms class. The prompt was to recount, in reverse sequencing, a personal dream. The dream above was a recurring nightmare I had roughly between age 7 and high school. It's been years since the dream last occurred, so here is what I wrote first, to help me remember:

Spongebob is still my largest stockpile for film/television references. Whatever happens in a day, I can probably think of a relevant episode. Like smells—I remember vividly how Patrick Star’s lack of a nose renders him immune to Spongebob’s bad breath one day. Or when ravenous anchovies are en-route to the Krusty Krab. Mr. Krabs senses them from far off: “Do you smell it? That smell. A kind of smelly smell. The smelly smell that smells… smelly… Anchovies…”

There’s a smell I can never correctly describe. In childhood it would happen often but, nowadays, it's every' five years, at most. I fear its arrival is long overdue. It always induces anxiety, inexplicable dread of imminent death or misfortune— the same sensation which accompanied the recurring childhood nightmare where I first smelled it.

The nightmare is set in rural Pennsylvania, at my mom’s childhood home—an old white farmhouse situated on not quite a hill, not quite a mountain. A 1.5 car-wide winding road weaves through trees and ascends. Gravel not-quite-roads break off from the main one and lead to sleepy homes and farms hidden among bushes and creeks. Five minutes zigzagging the forest, a traditional ‘honk honk’ of our horn when we pass Aunt Lynn and Uncle Mike’s farmhouse further down to sea-level than Grandma and Grandpa’s.

Across from a Civil War-era graveyard, a pathway forks away from the road. At the base of the pathway are seven mailboxes (despite only two houses up above) and an unofficial street sign my Mom gifted her parents for Christmas one year. The sign reads “Zimmerman Lane.”

Our car trekking upwards sounds like chewing ice. Boots and Brandy—or Sam, when I was younger—hear our approach and play sharks, circling our creeping car and barking welcomes. Besides the feral cat swarms camped in front of the farmhouse, there are only dogs since cows, sheep, chickens, horses, etc. left years ago. On either side of the incline are pine tree fields bred for Christmas sale. At the top of the pathway is a three-walled makeshift garage where an uncle keeps his truck, ATVs, and vice fridge. Across from the garage is a once-red barn which looks intentionally remodeled to be as brown and dilapidated as possible. More cats live there, and spiders, and Grandpa’s tractor to which in summertime he would hitch a wagon and pull the grandchildren through wooded acres to find blackberries.

Up the hill to the left is an uncle's log-house. Down to the right, around the barn’s tight corner, is a four-walled garage in which are stowed my grandparents’ cars from the 80s. Straight ahead is another hill up to Grandpa's trash-burning pit and, beyond that, overgrown crop fields. In between the barn and farmhouse is an old bathtub pressed into the ground, a drinking trough for former livestock. Just beyond the bathtub is a sharp decline down to a man-made pond we would sometimes fish in but rarely swam, for fear of leeches and the off-putting, fuzzy green clusters floating on top.

We park in the ever-muddy driveway and, stepping out of the car, we're vigilant for mud-disguised cat droppings. We step as though it’s a minefield, then onto the pavement where a different sort of anxiety is instilled by cat herds loitering in front of the screen door to the massive, disorganized, not-quite-a-garage where bikes and all sorts of things are hoarded and a long freezer holds various slaughtered meats. This room is where the dream begins.

· I’m alone

· Give the inevitably stuck wooden door a jerk and enter the kitchen

· Just inside a flannel multitude hangs from coat rack. Below is a floor mat and wads of muddy newspaper. I know it’s a dream because I don’t set my shoes on the newspaper, as house law mandates

· Empty kitchenette where I help Grandma do her baking, where she sits on a stool and smokes cigarettes for hours on end listening to a radio that remembers Elvis.

· Dining room. Table has the same sticky red-and-white checkerboard plastic. Aunt Gail sits there playing a card game with someone, I don’t remember who. I only see her. Not sure what game they’re playing.

· On the left is Grandpa’s rocking chair, where he would always sit, watching his family, drawling out his garbled wit in some elderly accent I still can’t label

· Behind the rocking chair there should be a door. Instead, a dusty mirror. I don’t remember seeing myself when I pass by.

· Through second arch on the left into what should be the TV room—where the dogs lay on the couch to the left, where Judge Judy or college football reside next to old bookcases, a brown chair with ridged felt and ottoman separated from Grandpa’s fuzzy blanket-draped red recliner by a small end table on which rested a never-allowed-to-be-empty bowl of root beer barrels.

· I didn’t see any of that. Instead I smelled that peculiar smell and felt dread flood through me. In the middle of the room, the ceiling of which was so high as to be unseen, was a technicolor monster chicken. That’s the best way to describe it, even though the absurdity of such a phrase doesn’t begin to depict the terror the creature bestowed. Its enormity, its magnificent color variation, its massive wings and beak and small bloodshot eyes. And the smell of foreboding.

· Horrified, I turned back to the kitchen

· Aunt Gail and her card partner were gone

· Alone, except for the smell.

· I look in the mirror again and do see myself—child inside, but ancient man, face wrinkled, scraggly white hair and beard falling out of sight beneath the mirror

· I open my mouth to scream, and do so with all my strength. But all is quiet. My mouth moves to no effect. My terror inaudible. My old age inevitable.

· I awake