found drama

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dream.20050820: The Head of Rod Stewart

by Rob Friesel

Fall. Our house but somehow morphed into my grandparents’ old Gorham, Maine house. The never-used front of it at least. Right down to that weird front door and the ancient tree. But it was Our Dining Room in the front wing that exists on neither house. Fall had just set in. And the big tree had suddenly gone naked and shed all its leaves into a quilt-like patchwork upon the ground. Filled with childlike glee, I grab our digital camera and run outside to document nature’s spectacle. There are some decent shots. A is making fun of me and I invoke my common defense: Digital camera’s don’t cost us a dime in film. The orange is spectacular. Truly awesome. But the shot I really want to get requires me to hold steady in an uncomfortable crouch. I manage to snap the image twice but it’s blurry both times. On the third I manage to fall through the leaves. Through the soil and into some post-cyberpunk Night City alleyway. Very R. Talsorian. I’m In Character all of the sudden and I’ve been given the task of bringing the mummified head of Rod Stewart to the cyborg Al Jourgensen. There’s a lot of fighting in a nightclub. Gunfire and flashing knives. Some guys in bulletproof Gucci are hot on my heels. Lucky for me their aim is teh suck. I barely make it out alive and retreat to some bombed out house in some bombed out part of town. Things here have a vaguely subterranean feel to them. Maybe it’s just that I’m in the basement. I rent a bedroom with concrete floors and build a makeshift bed out of moldy sourcebooks upon which to recover. Somehow I managed to smuggle the head out in this half hole-filled Jansport bag. Still, it feels like the cyborg Al betrayed me. I am filled with the urge to write-write-write.

About Rob Friesel

Software engineer by day. Science fiction writer by night. Weekend homebrewer, beer educator at Black Flannel, and Certified Cicerone. Author of The PhantomJS Cookbook and a short story in Please Do Not Remove. View all posts by Rob Friesel →

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