The Dream State

XYLER DASCHUND

The green eyes of the Nebelung cat struck my vision. He was a philandering piece of shit for having stolen my wife and then dumping her a month later. Now we stare eye to eye. Ned, the prick, began to lick himself.

I was assiduous in where I stared as Ned lifted his leg. And to imagine, I used to feed him bowls and bowls of cat food. I let him live and this is how he repaid me. I took him in like a son and this is how he forced my hand.

    "You want drugs, motherfucker or are you going to keep standing there?" He began to moult, his fur shaken off in tufts and wiry strands. Now he was a hairless cat that continued to lick its new pink wrinkled skin.

    "You don't remember me?" I said. There was a realisation in his eyes, a glint of horror. Ned dropped the packets of heroin on the floor and made a run for it. I chased him down and stomped on his tail. He yelped and clawed at the concrete but I planted my feet.

    "I said - you remember me?"

    "YES - YES - YES, I fuckin' remember you!" the cat crowed, putting a packet into his mouth. It came back out of his mouth, wrapped in a hairball. "Shit! My cocksucking habits." I reached down to grab it and untangled it.

    "First you steal my wife, then you sell fucking drugs," I said. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

    "Sometimes I even impress myself, biatch." I snuck the packet into my pocket and reached down to push Ned's head into the ground.

    "Listen to me. You are gonna live the rest of your life in jail. I'm gonna turn you in. Do you use as well?"

    "No," he said.

    "Do you get high?" I asked. "Tell me the truth!" I shattered his incisor against the concrete. He hissed in pain.

    "Yes - yes! Sometimes when I'm feeling low."

    "How do you take it? Needle and spoon?" I patted the hairless cat down even though he couldn't possibly keep it anywhere. But I felt something underneath him. I stepped off his tail and grabbed him by the arms. I flipped him over and crushed his tail again.

    He was meowing like crazy but nobody cared for this lost soul. There were stitches above the cat's genitals. I unstitched it by pulling the thread out. A needle and a burnt spoon piled out onto the cat's belly.

    I sighed and let go of Ned's tail. He scrambled to collect his equipment. He whimpered as he collapsed against the ground with the needle under one paw and the spoon in the other.

    "I'm in rehab."

    "Bullshit," was all I said.

"It's the truth. That's why my hair's gone."

"Then why are you selling? Isn't that the opposite of rehab?"

"I gotta do what they say."

"Who?"

"Nevermind."

"No - who?"

"Drug kingpin."

"You serious?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die." I paced back and forth along the alleyway.

"Why do you gotta do what he says?"

"Tell me. Have you seen your wife in the past few days?"

"No, why?"

"He's got her bounded up and her ass sticking out of a glory hole where clientele gets to inseminate their little rubber coloured condoms with their little tiny peckers. A hundred bucks for an ounce of cum or whatever those shrunken penises can ejaculate into a protective to make it burst. They can turn them into water balloons to throw at each other for all I care. I just hope they drown in it."

    "Shut up! I get the idea. Why?" 

Ned sat up, his eyes welling up with cat tears.

"Because of me! It's my fault! I borrowed some heroin that I was supposed to give to someone else. Heroin that would last a lifetime. Me - I shot it all up and felt the high for hours. It felt more like minutes, seconds even."

The hairless cat looked unrecognisable from the pet I once cherished. He had

experienced reality and gravity had flown him up only for him to be burnt by the sun as a consequence of flying too close.

    "They knew they couldn't hurt me. Look at me - I'm a cat, there's not much you can do to a cat before it dies. So they threatened to break my heart. Now I gotta make sales for the rest of the year and only then will they let her go. Yeah, go ahead. Tell me off. I deserve it."

    "Where is this drug kingpin?" He looked up at me with terror.

"No - no - no - NO! I'm not giving away anything. You're not getting close to him. I'm

doing this for your safety."

    "I'm not getting close. We're getting close. This is your redemption arc, Ned. I am going to kill that cunt. And then I am going to save my wife. Are you in? Or are you out?"

    "We can't even get close. He's a drug kingpin. He's gonna have bodyguards the size of a tree and number of thugs the population of East - "

    "IN or OUT?"

I malingered to get out of my night shift and ran to the drug kingpin's base of operations. I waited for Ned before making a move. We both took a hit of heroin from a bong at the front door of the kingpin's office to ascertain our allegiance to the drug and the man in charge of distribution and production.

The bodyguards allowed us in when they had thoroughly searched us. We sat down  - Ned leapt up the seat. The two bodyguards stood at the door. There was a PA system set up and a speaker in the upper corner of the room. I reached over to Ned's testicular pouch.

"So are we gonna talk business or are you gonna continue to scrub his balls?"

"We're going to talk business, but first of all, is that your family?" I said from the speaker and focused my eyes on the framed photo lodged between stacks of money on the shelf behind him. The kingpin turned his head to the speaker in the corner of the room.

"How are you doing that?"

"Nevermind that. Answer the question." He scowled at me and spun around to shift the photo in my direction.

"It is. That was taken at Lassen - " I shot him in the head with a silencer. I slouched into the chair and tucked my legs inwards. I bent my arm backwards and pointed the gun at the two bodyguards, switching from shoulder to shoulder to put bullets in their skulls and using the reflection of the framed picture to guide my aim.

Their inimical mood had only gotten them so far in the bodyguard business. They couldn't even shoot through a chair, let alone pat the cat down rigorously. Ned struggled to close the pouch up.

"This is," he said, "inhumane."

"You're not human. Let's go." I reached into his pouch and grabbed another mag.

"And you're not a cat, anything else new?" We sneaked into the accompanying warehouse. There she was. My beautiful wife. And on the other side of that hanging wall, a man was smacking his dick against her bare bum cheek like a taiko drum.

She was shackled against the wall and gagged with nothing to sit on except for that hole in the wall. I ran towards her but a huge barrier stopped me in my tracks.

It was flowing chaotically and amassing sluggishly. It reflected the light of the sun as did a rainbow, but that rainbow appeared in slithers as metastasizing worms folding over each other, toiling in a heavy and hardening liquid.

I removed it with a disapproving thought. This was my power, yes? To remove insufferable errors in this drea - world. Where has that damn cat gone?

I hurried over to her. In the room complementing the hole, other men sat around the sexual act, ruminating most likely about the significance of the drum performance they were witnessing and how they could join the orchestra.

"Sweetheart, I'm gonna get you out of this. But I'm gonna need you to make an opening."

She looked up at me and she had the face of a cat. Ned. That ginger cuck (the phonetic variant of this word, that starts with an 'F', would be more fitting. Clearly my cheating wife does not dominate the cheater). He must have done something to her. Poisoned the watering hole and the genetic pool to manifest a travesty, a wrong course in human evolution.

"An opening?! No catnip, no deal. I quite enjoy being plowed out of my fucking brains by these working men. What do you work as? Game designer? The best game you ever designed was your life. Wake up. You're wasting your time on an unplayable prototype - a shell of a shell. See what's happening right now? That man is just slapping away and making me orgasm harder than your cock ever was. Wake up! You're nothing to gamers. They won't respect your work. They'll respect the characters, the story, the gameplay and the accessibility. They'll respect you selling out all for meagre coins to a company that will ruin the game through microtransactions and pointless DLCs and tireless frame drops. But they won't respect your addition of a dragon. You know why? Cause you gotta be that dragon! That is the only way to satisfy gamers and their lust for power and destruction. Only if they get to become what they have been playing as! WAKE THE FUCK UPPP..."