Bullethead

One night I dreamt I got shot in the head. Someone squeezed off a round and Pow! A bullet drilled a hole like a tunnel clean through, in one side and out the other. You could hear the wind whistling in it when I walked around, and everyone thought I looked and sounded kind of strange. Well, stranger than usual. And since it was summer, my head quickly filled with gnats and mosquitoes. I could hear them in there all the time, aimlessly whining and buzzing about, bumping into the walls of the tunnel, nibbling on the soft tissue. I needed a pneumatic air hose, a really powerful one hooked up to a big compressor, with which I could blow the little fuckers right out of there. But where could I find such a device? All the hardware stores were closed. And if the bugs weren’t bad enough, the world around me had begun to look different. All the objects in creation had become two-dimensional now, each with its own attendant shadow. Not only that, but the sun never seemed to set anymore. Instead of going up and down, it just went around and around in the sky, as if we were at the North Pole. What had become of the night? Had the bullet eliminated my nightlife, too? It occurred to me that this might be an illusion produced by too much sleep. Perhaps I’d fallen into the habit of dozing off while the sun was still up, waking only after it had risen again. But if I were sleeping, it certainly wasn’t to dream, and I supposed the bullet had taken care of those, too, my dreams, having blasted all of them out into space. Where once I’d a head full of dreams, I now had gnats and mosquitoes.

No … but wait a minute … the whole situation was a dream. It was all just a dream in the first place! I dreamt the whole thing, that’s all. What a relief ... I was only dreaming to begin with ...

Later I met a guy who really had been shot in the head. In fact, he'd done the job himself, a bullet in one side and out the other, clean like a tunnel. That’s what he told me, anyway. I was most surprised. Life is full of surprises, you see. No ... wait a minute ... it was more than surprising. It was amazing. Utterly amazing.

The Day of the Dead

All Souls'