John 22:1

So lets begin with a trip down deep into John’s dream. Through the ear, surf on some neurones and finally into the wood where he sits with his friends. From a comfortable patch behind a bush I can listen to what they’re saying. Although the fire on the leaf-ridden floor lights up their expressions it still doesn’t tell the truth about what John is thinking, or just who John is. Neither, I should think, does it tell what is thought by his friends. Those friends sat on scattered fallen trees around the fire.
    Somehow this dream is more real than the others, isn’t it, John? This is the first time you realise what it is to know the difference between dreams and being awake, don’t you? He should have seen his face when I walked from behind the bush into the firelight. It was like his mother had just told him she was partial to the odd bit of incest. I’m sure my mother isn’t. I hope not. Who is my mother? Really doesn’t matter. It would shock me if she confessed to the odd bit of incest, lovely mother though.
    Anyway, it was at this point that the others were emerging from behind branches, out of rabbit holes and falling with a pleasant leaf-enhanced ‘flump’ to the ground surrounding the collection of friends.
    Personally I’m glad we chose woods for our meeting place, I always loved a good autumnal scene complete with campfire. Those trees that tucked you in at night with their warm branches like the arms of my parents.
    We, that is, me and the others, sat around the fire next to our closest friends, they didn’t know us, they didn’t even know we existed until now, but we knew more about them than anyone else. I looked at John with slow anticipation, his lips parted softly to ask the question. I stopped him short and just said, “The best friend you’ll ever have, the man who peered in through the window in your every dream, the man who ended the dream just before you hit the concrete, the hairs on your neck, the narrator who stopped you doing the stupid thing with that girl”.
    Thoughts whirled in John’s head and cut back to the moment. He felt warm and light headed. He knew about me as I did him. He knew what he was looking for. He knew his name was centuries old. Cold tingles roared over his body and head like blue gas flames, yes you do know me. I’d imagine from the blaring white displayed in the four pairs of eyes around the fire that they were hearing, and thinking the same too. There was so much to tell, and only dreams to tell it in, “this will be the coma that you never remember,” I licked into John’s ear.
    The flames licked higher from the fire as it was tickled with a stick, spitting out embers that crackled to my delight. For a moment the fire held a stony silence as the closest friends we ever had stared deep into the flame searching for some other truth, an alternative truth to the one they had just been dealt.
    “It won’t do you any good thinking those thoughts Greg,” came a soft, holy distant voice from the other side of the fire. No matter how soft, it still broke the air like a bomb and the flames lit Aamu’s beautiful warm white face, dutifully. Those sleepy brown eyes just as concerned as her long winding hand caressing Greg’s like a concerned mother, soft with love. I saw this motion repeated and varied. The ghostly pale hippy Kari (yes that’s right, complete with sunglasses in the pitch dark with only campfire for light, isn’t he just blissful?) with an arm wrapped around the blankly staring, weeping, shivering Ben. Suva-Päivä kissed Laura upon her head and wiped away the chill from her cheeks with her golden hands. It seemed to warm the white in her cheeks to a rose red, and as she swept back Laura’s smooth black hair I saw a smile, and a tentative look up into Suva-Päivä’s deep blue eyes. That shockingly blonde hair and sweet golden face that seeped the heat of a small star. John always desired to keep a star like that in dusty jar on his mantelpiece, just to take out in the winter to keep warm. It could be shown to him, and when we have finished this tale it shall be easier for him to walk free, having his own stars and his own ways to keep him warm. We shall now begin our story, the story that concerns no-one but the ones who read it, the ones who read it breathe its life, and the ones who read it draw it out from just a little coma to give it speech. It’s just a story after all isn’t it? A story in a coma? Isn’t that just it?

Ian Stanley