Cold sweats. Panicked breathing. A stark and overcoming fear once I realize I am unable to move my arms. There are no dark, shadowy figures sitting atop my chest in this version of a classic myth, but the colours shooting in and out of my vision do their awful work well. It’s all I can do to lie and wait for this to pass, a passive and submissive prisoner trapped in a shell of tissue and assorted meats. Screeching like metal on metal run dry of oil, my head fills with the hollow sound of a hundred cogs as they grind my mind to a halt. Bats and axes fall heavily onto my chest, but they vanish as my head locks still. I try to breathe, but all I hear is a dusty wheeze as my eyes dry over and I can’t lift their lids. Someone is standing in the doorway. Rational thought eludes me as my wrists are bound tight to the bed. The pins and needles that accompany a rush of blood to an uncirculated area light fires in my nerves as I feel the icy cool adrenaline pump madly through my body. The scratching of metal across the floor ekes out a death knell reserved for those with neither space nor time. An index finger raises slowly to a tattered mouth. By now the full spectrum of colours is beaming through my eyes, piercing and jabbing at my lobes like a bothered botanist on a bad day at work. Balls of terror congeal in globules around my eyes and suddenly I cannot breathe. My chest is winded, heavy and pained like the forks of a thousand cigarettes burning through the ribs around my lungs. The blackened mass moves closer, step by step dragging its boots toward my head. I feel it smirk as it looms closer, positioning itself just out of my line of sight. I’d move to confront it directly if only my neck weren’t solidified in ice.
axe 25
When I’ve given myself time to think about it, I know what looms at the foot of my bed. It reaches just barely enough for my toes that my nerve endings fire outward, seeking to identify the loose connection that throws my aura into a tailspin. Though myth might define this presence as demonic or clandestine I know it for exactly what it is. It is faceless. It is haunting. It is all too familiar. What else but the nagging tickle of nervousness returning from the depths of semi-consciousness to butcher the ego and act out the id’s unrelenting desire to feed? Caught between reality and dreamscape, fully aware of the axe about to gnaw my face to bloodied shreds, I’m almost able to close my eyes as the shadow slowly slices open a portion of my cheek. A friendly reminder of the darkness that can eat me from within. As the ghost of anxiety recedes into my inner self I watch the shadow change and evaporate until nothing but a hazy mist covers my tired eyes. Covered in sweat and exhausted I pull myself out from under the covers and touch my feet to the floor. Rattled but not broken I drag myself out of bed and turn on the coffeemaker.