Samantha Tungston Dreams

of a fiery heart with hawk wings trapped in the bowels of a building buried beneath East Tangiers. She dreams of her city, mutated by a piss yellow sun, overrun with men who are not like men, all in search of that mystery buried under somewhere, under some street.

She dreams of a carriage driver with no horses and no carriage. He wears a deep purple top hat and a motorcar’s engine around his neck and he licks his teeth like they were candy. The carriage driver has brought her here to this other East Tangiers. He moves slowly, weighed down by the device around his neck, but his arms are free and they undulate in ways that make Samantha think more of sex than she’d like.

He takes her hand and tells her that he can’t show her to the buried building, though he knows exactly where it is, has the map in fact. Then he leans in and licks her teeth, his top hat sliding down his smooth and powdered hair. The smell is horrible, a baked and rancid sweetness. “I will awake from this” Samantha thinks as she swoons in the dream, her dream consciousness floating somwhere above her dream body, and she sees her dream body being strapped to the carriage drivers back, her legs dangling loose and free from his now more hunched form. “And when I do awaken I will be home.” And Samantha watches in a dream, as the sun beats down upon her limp form, slouching backwards away down the streets of a city she thought she knew, her head lulls left then right, left then right.