Arts and Crafts and Re-Animation

I was in the lobby of my UO dormitory, working on a collage of the Mona Lisa. It was finals week and the school had decided to put out tables and arts and crafts materials for stressed-out students to use to relax and do something with extra energy. I had secured some Con-Tac paper and some scraps of colored paper and was tearing the paper carefully. I wanted to make the plastic the top layer of my masterpiece, so I had to work backwards, putting the fine detail on first and then the larger bits. It wasn't an exact replica, though, more a modernized semi-Cubist Mona Lisa. I was pretty happy. I think I had finished all my finals and was just goofing off.

My younger sister Matie rushed up to me in a white lab coat. She needed my help with something urgent, so I wandered off behind her. She was angry that I wasn't being faster, but I wasn't going to rush off without knowing what was up.

Matie led me up the stairs to my dorm room and told me to unlock it. I did so, and she popped in and grabbed a box of my insulin syringes. Then she ran off down the hall. I was more intrigued than I was annoyed by this, so I followed her again, down to the 3rd floor and into one of the wings. I remembered that this was where her room was, but for some reason all the doors in this wing were off their hinges and it was very cold. The light seemed to have a greenish cast. Before I knew it, I was in a morgue.

This did not disturb me greatly. Perhaps there had always been a morgue in Carson dorm. I found Matie in one of the rooms with a jar full of glowing green ooze. She was surrounded with corpses of dorm residents, lending credence to the theory that this was the UO morgue. Some of the bodies had syringes sticking out of their necks. It was clear that she was using my syringes to inject the corpses with the green stuff.

I asked Matie why she needed MY syringes, and she said something about HIV precautions. I pointed out that her subjects seemed to be DEAD, and that it didn't much matter if she used the same needles. Matie rolled her eyes at me and sighed. She asked me to help with the experiment. I knew what was going on here. She had watched "Re-Animator" one too many times and was doing some re-animation of her own. Unlike Herbert West's dimwitted assistant Dan, though, I realized that no good could come of this and declined her offer. I walked briskly back down the hall, being sure to shut the door to that wing. As I started towards the stairwell, I heard the dead begin to shriek in chorus. At this point I was much more exasperated than scared.

I went down to the second floor of my dorm, and it was a hospital. It wasn't shaped the same as the dorm building, and when I left the stairs, they disappeared. Although this hospital didn't look at all like Providence, where my mother works, I knew that she was working there.

I was in a strange hospital lobby. It really looked more like an airport. There were benches and seats all over, with people waiting patiently in them. There were a lot of businessmen, straight from the 1950s. They sat quietly reading their newspapers while I wandered around the hospital lobby. After a long time, my mother appeared.

I took it on faith that she was my mother. Her face and hair looked sort of the same, but her body was a lot different. I know Mom's going to read this at some point, so I'll pull a Sonia H. Greene and describe her current form as "adequately excellent." Anyway, in my dream, Mom was a BABE. Enormous breasts, tiny waist, huge hips and legs longer than the Great Wall. Well turned ankles, too. I guess that was good, because she had to wear the classic slutty nurse outfit -- all white miniskirt, white high heels, low cut blouse, goofy hat bobby pinned on. I bet the high heels made her back hurt.

Mom came up to me with her clipboard in hand.

"I had a good night," she confided in me, "Punched another one of those God-damned nuns, smack in the kisser. She's still hiding in the break room!"

We both laughed about that and started walking to the cafeteria. My last memory is the mediocre soup smell.

I found myself wandering through a Hallmark store with my roommate Tina. We were shopping, but I'm not exactly sure for what. I think it might have been the hospital gift shop, but it was about as large as the average department store.

I found a rack of oversized postcards and started pawing through them. I picked one out. It was a portrait of Hitler, in the sepia tones of nostalgia. The picture was only about the size of a deck of cards. The rest of the postcard was taken up by an intricate Celtic motif that featured turnips woven into the knotwork. The border had been cut out with a laser, so there were holes where there wouldn't be any turnips or cord. It was strangely hypnotic.

Tina walked over to me with the basket. She showed me what she'd found: several small plastic bottles in translucent jewel tones. They were all the size of spice jars, and they were shaped like tiny princesses. I think Tina was going to paint them. That would have turned out well, I think. I showed her my turnip-Hitler postcard, and she laughed and laughed.

Putting it back in its envelope (even though it was a postcard), one of the edges caught my hand. I winced from my papercut, and when I looked down there was no skin at all left on my hand. It had come off like a glove and was half hanging out of the Hitler envelope. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, I pulled it out of the envelope. It was turned inside out, so I tried to carefully pull it back the right way. It was hard, like working with a sticky latex glove. I was careful to check which hand it went on, even though I had one tendon and muscle hand and one skin hand. I didn't want to put it on the wrong one.

I put the glove of skin back on my skinless hand. I could feel the flesh adhering again, so I wasn't terribly worried. I snuck that card back into the rack and picked a different one, though.