Marinated in his own stale sweat, he crawled deliriously from his sickbed to the fan. Knocking it on, with a feverishly shaky fist and a grunt, he returned to his acrid mattress and collapsed into stupor.
The malady had him firmly in its grip, had done all day, while sounds of childish delight filtered faintly through double glazed windows, from the world beyond. His mind wasn’t there, however… It had traveled back in time, fueled by the rhinovirus in his system as well as the regret in his valentine’s heart.
The sound in his swollen ears was not that of the skanky neighbor’s children playing in the square beyond his window, but another sound in a time long since lost to him. He’d awoken in that shady motel room once more. Her smiling face looking down upon him, sipping ice cold beer from a bottle as sweaty as they had been. The muffled clatter of the night train as it passed through Romulus at two in the morning, their sonic backdrop. But that was a long time ago. Now another life.
She finished her beer and lay on the sheets next to him. I’m dreaming, he realized. He must wake. Why must he?
‘I’m dreaming this, aren’t I?’ He asked her, looking upon her magnificence as she laid a hand on her stomach. The same belly he’d paid homage to with a thousand butterfly kisses. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘And you must wake. You’re sick and it’s brought you back here. Time to go home, Future Boy.’
Darkgingerbread 