I fell asleep somewhere between duty and desire and woke up inside a dream that felt like a secret message. It arrived as a party in a war zone, a girl who knew me better than I knew myself, and an alarm that pulled me back to a life of orders. Below is the dream, then what it stirred in me, and how I’m turning that stir into something I can actually use.
The Party Dream
I met a girl on orders, overseas—foreign yet oddly familiar, like a city I’d once loved in another life. We dressed in dark clothes for a party while the war outside kept time with distant explosions. Downstairs, deals were being made in hushed voices; upstairs, the party was a small, private world.
The room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. People wore black and silver, layered fabrics and thrifted jewelry; a few had haircuts that looked like they’d been sketched from mood boards. I sat on a couch that felt too soft for the place, watching the room fill. Conversations folded into one another—talk of crushes, of last night’s music, of plans that felt both urgent and trivial. A shy goth kid was being nudged toward someone he liked; the girls laughed like they were practicing courage.
I kept my phone in my hand. I scrolled, edited short clips, toggled between content and something more private—explicit, quick, a secret I carried in my pocket. The girl next to me—dark, short‑haired, thin—didn’t comment. She watched me the way someone watches a small, interesting animal: curious, unafraid.
At some point my leg found hers, a pretzel of limbs that felt accidental and intimate at once. I stayed half‑present, half‑elsewhere, my attention split between the screen and the warmth beside me. When I finally looked, she had painted one of my nails pink, then—sloppily—green, my favorite color. I felt a small, surprised pleasure. I had assumed I wouldn’t fit in on this mission; here was proof I might.
She reached for my other hand. While she painted, I found a blank space in her planner titled “For Smashing.” I thought of drawing an octopus—familiar, clever, easy to sketch—and imagined she’d like it. But the moment my pen touched paper the octopus dissolved into something else: an outline of a woman sitting at the end of a table, eyebrows curled in anger or surprise. Before I could finish, the girl took my pen and completed the line. I began another figure, closer to my point of view—another woman, equally bitter. Another moment passed and I breathed on the page, and the girl said she could see it only then.
I frightened myself. How was I making these images? How could she finish what I hadn’t? The intimacy of being seen turned sharp. Then a knock at the door: military people, precise and immediate. I answered, “aye aye, sir,” and began stuffing my watch, keys, glasses, and phone into my pockets. The girl was gone. Outside, the foreign land stretched cold and low; hills rolled under a gray sky where soldiers ran drills. We walked down a catwalk toward whatever came next. That’s when the alarm hit—sharp, unavoidable, and final.
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What the symbols mean to me
The party
I arrive dressed to belong but sit like an observer. This is me wanting to be part of something while feeling performative. I show up in the right clothes but keep my distance, measuring how much of myself I’ll risk.
The phone and private content
My phone is a pocket world where I edit, watch, and hide. It’s the part of me I compartmentalize—creative work, private desires, things I don’t bring into the room. It comforts me and isolates me at the same time.
The girl who paints my nails
The octopus that becomes women
Finishing drawings by breathing on them
The military summons and the alarm
What I’m going to do with this
– Draw for five minutes every morning this week. Start with an octopus and let it change. I’ll write the first three emotions that come up.
– Name one person who has seen me recently and send them a small, honest message—no pressure, just recognition.
– List my alarms—the three obligations that feel loudest right now—and write one tiny action for each I can complete today.
Dreams don’t hand us answers so much as invitations.
A Dark Fiction Collection of Folklore and Body Horror
Folklore and Flesh is a masterwork of dread operating at the convergence of two primal anxieties: the terror of the isolated environment and the fear of the body betraying itself. In exploring these tensions, we must consider what makes us human or drone. This is Folk Body Horror: a fusion of ancient cultural dread and grotesque physical transformation.
In this collection of dark stories and poetry, the boundary between myth and matter collapses. The tales explore the uncanny territory where ancestral lore ceases to be a cautionary story and becomes a biological instruction manual for corruption.
This collection binds 10 creative short stories and a dozen visceral poems.
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