Childs Play [Short Story]

 

I write and dream, for without stories, we are nothing.

Finally! After a bit of a gap, I got my arse to sit down and work on something besides the comic-scripts that have been staring at me for weeks. I think I needed this change to sort-of unblock things, kind of a mental colon-blow! (sorry for that!)

Anyway, this time I decided I was going to really push my luck! SO, I’ve combined writing prompts from two different sources – Bekindrewrites InMon and Andy’s Two For Tuesday – and I gotta say, it was challenging as hell!!

For your information, InMon gave me five prompts which I in my usual fashion have incorporated into the text of this story (all of them!) and Andy required a story that had a metaphor or a simile every 50 words. Well except for maybe being every 50-60 words, I’ve incorporated all the above into this original little tale that I thought was both insightful and a wee bit disturbing by the time I had thought the idea through – yet somehow I feel like there is a hopeful tone to it all, even amidst the dark. Do let me know what you folks think, it’s what I live for with all this writing!

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The first thing to be done was to engage his super-all-purpose body-suit. As a long-time navigator of lucid dreams, he was ever mindful of the “pinch-me” conundrum that was always a danger to the dreamer who wished to remain in this realm.

The very air shimmered around him like a cloud of diamond dust and he was covered in mere seconds from head to toe in a flowing metallic armour that he was certain made him look like a shiny, silver Iron Man from the outside. With a thought, he was floating off the ground now. This world was his own stage and he was it’s director and so he rose, leaving behind the idyllic forest his mind had brought him to upon his slumber.

He was headed to The City.

When he had first begun to realise he was capable of waking within his dreams, it was the ultimate in childs play. Like a kid in a candy store, he went from confused to excited to scared to wild-unadulterated joy. The waking world was not a pleasant place and he had been broken by it. Now he had found within his own mind, a possible key to fixing his life – like a mechanic overhauling an engine, he would traverse his mind and fight back, rage against the dying of the light until all was shiny again and the bad but a speck of darkness.

But first, he had to get to The City. His fortress, the place he had built peopled by the good parts of his inner self that fought beside him. Like a general of old, he had rallied them and now, after years of battle, they had the upper hand. He could see the buzz of activity at the Skyport, they knew he was coming and preparations for the final push were underway. Sky-cruisers glimmered in the morning light, behemoths were they that might outmatch even the Titans of old.

The tumultuous sounds arose as he flew closer, his people prepared for war and awaited their leader. Doing a fly-by, his mind wandered and he found himself remembering how it all began. He had been a happy child and grown well and been loved, but then slowly something insidious ate away at him from within, like maggots on a corpse they slowly ate away at his mind and heart. Even the lucid dreams that had no concept of time began to get affected. There were times when he was lost for days in a haze of sorrow as if these demons were rotting away time itself and he was losing all sense of it.

But like the Phoenix from it’s own ashes, he would rise again. He would not go quietly into the night.

Alighting at the command level, he approached his officers who were already moving toward him. Today was going to be the day. They had not been able to breach the enemies defense but this time they would win through.

It mattered not what the doctors said. He was not like Custer or Tipu Sultan, he would win.

He would wake up.

And then one day perhaps they would let him go home.