I Was a Teenage Mothman, part 2

plus storms of snow and snores

Do not try to milk Catbot. The Horror, the horror. Photo by Ashley Hayes.

Continued from Part 1 . . .

The next day I found her liquid-chalking the blackboard outside the coffee shop. “Does that say ‘CAT MILK’?”

She reinforced the right side of the C so it said OAT MILK.

“Hey, I didn’t know. Cats are mammals. They give milk.”

“Have you ever milked a cat?” Her Appalachian accent really came out on that line, stretching the vowels so much they sometimes broke into dipthongs. Cay-at. It was adorable.

“No.”

“Well, don’t. They don’t like it.”

“Is that how you got those scratches on your arms?”

She looked guarded. “You’re so weird.”

“And that’s why you like me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And you’re old,” she said, somewhere between mean and matter-of-fact. We were outside, and there was no one else in hearing range. “You know I’m not going to fuck you.” Though that’s exactly what she had been doing, in my lucid dream the night before. I had cast another sigil, right before bed.

“Wine gets better with age,” I said.

“I’m not old enough to drink alcohol,” she retorted.

“Just coffee, then?”

“Just coffee.”

She did come up to me later, though, with a notification from Flap, a sighting of a “monster bird.” She seemed really interested in it. It was not much, and she clearly wanted more details. Kept asking what if? questions, as she swung by on her various errands around the store.

I was happy to play that game with her, as long as she wanted, but at some point I needed to get some work done instead of wasting time surreptitiously watching her ass as she climbed onto the bar to dust the hanging light fixtures by whacking them with a rag. She was a little more pear-shaped than I originally thought. In a good way.

Actually I felt guilty about the voyeurism, and anxious about her reaction when she inevitably caught me, so I left before that could happen. By the time I went to sleep that night I thought I should just confine my attentions to the dream world.

Lucid dreaming is not absolute. There’s a spectrum of clarity and control. On this night I didn’t meet her image in my idealized (and clean) apartment. I went to her. I imagined her in a big house out in the ‘burbs, living with her parents. As I was floating outside her window, watching her undress, pleasantly waiting for the right moment to insert myself into the situation, she turned and saw me. Her reaction was not what I was hoping for. Her eyes got huge, and she screamed.

I started awake, feeling a little sick. I did not go back to sleep that night.

I Was a Teenage Mothman, part 3