Walking Sideways

    The room was stale and heavy with the residue of a dream that clung to the surface of her mind. She felt her body waking, her eyelids reluctantly opening to face the late afternoon. The heat was already becoming uncomfortable and her breath reeked of last nights cigarettes and cheap beer. She stayed in bed anyway, recollecting the details of the dream.

She had given birth to some sort of armadillo child. It's skin was wrinkled and hard like a shell, and it had long sharp fingernails. She couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl and she didn't care. She wanted to forget that it was even her child. Her friends and family seemed to take no notice of the strange baby and didn't seem to mind that she paid no attention to it. She had left it wrapped in some blankets, alone in a room. She had gone and laid in a bed with Ziggy, an old girlfriend from college, and felt so safe and secure there. Ziggy was beautiful, with a radiant smile and sunshine reflecting off her hair. Then the baby had started crying. She ran to the room where she heard the crying and found the baby crawling out of the blankets she had wrapped it in. She picked up the child and was overwhelmed with guilt and love, and she realized that she had never fed it. Naturally, she took the baby to her breast, but the feeding was interrupted when her mother came through the door, and she covered the baby with shame. She didn't want anyone to know that she was breast feeding him.

    To be continued...