1.

I wake up in the morning dripping in melted butter from the neck down. It makes my chest hair feel like tapeworms and my fingernails shine with a yellowish hue, like the gloss-painted nails of a chain smoker. My bedsheets are ruined, tinged the colour of piss. 

​

2.

I’m being chased by a pack of feral dogs in a suburban back-alley. Some look like the Shih Tzu my auntie owned when I was five years old, that would jump to my waist height and scratch its claws against my stomach whenever I entered the house. The rest are three-headed German Shepherds, each one a triplet of mouths frothing like the diesel trains that passed behind my auntie’s back garden.

​

3.

My bedroom is on fire. The inside lock is broken and won’t open. I choke on the soot like it’s stardust from the big bang.

​

4.

I wake up covered in butter again.

 

5.

I get a call from my little brother. He tells me mum is currently in an ambulance after he found her having a seizure in the bathroom. I feel the blood drain from my own body as her skin turns the colour of sour milk.

 

6.

I’m chained to a chair sat at a dining table. In the other seat sits my ex-lover. I shiver as she runs her yellowed fingernails along the inside of my thigh. She kisses me, hard, my lips a bulging blue-grey bruise as she pulls out a pocket knife and runs the blunt edge across my throat.

 

7.

I’m running from a pack of falling stars. One of them keeps whispering my name.

 

8.

I watch my own funeral from a church balcony. I see everyone I’ve ever loved sat there, all with blue bags under their eye-sockets, oversized like Anton Ego’s in Ratatouille. I see my best friend there. She stands, walks to the front, and runs a single hand over the deep brown casket. I see the pain in her eyes as she turns back and stares at the balcony. 

 

9.

I wake up with a soggy pillowcase. 

 

10.

I’m being chased by feral dogs again. Only this time as I look back I see the German Shepherds rip the Shih Tzus limb from limb, blood spurting across the wooden fences like my auntie’s dog when it was hit by a freighter.
 

11.

I’m reading my eulogy in the local newspaper. It's shorter than I’d want it to be. It reads, “Loving brother, son, and friend. Loved his music and his writing. Will be dearly missed.” It reminds me of how much work I still have to do.

 

12.

I wake up covered in butter again. My glasses slip out of my shaking hands as I try to put them on. My bed smells stale, musty, like the piss of a man too frail to control his own bowel movements. As I grab a fresh set of bedsheets from my wardrobe, my hand strokes across a small lump on the side of my chest. I feel the blood drain from my body again.