The Girl You Never Kissed

I dreamt that you arrived on my doorstep in a hurricane of Amazon, African, enormous snakes, the cobra kind with the long wing bits against their necks. I ran into the house and slammed the door only to watch it dissolve in front of me and as I turned the house dissolved behind me so that the whole world was only you and I and snakes. And you stood right outside where the door had been in a long dress of furled and gleeful black—the fabric thick and heavy as though it was a kind of velvet woven out of tar or pitch. And you smiled like a Queen who sees her lover led to the guillotine, a slightly deranged smile that opened a little wider than your mouth should have been possible to move and you held in one hand an enormous and dignified boa that swayed its head just a little back and forth as though wondering that a mere I could be worth all this fuss and you smiled wider, looking radiantly evil and I knew you were a queen of something and the snake was coming towards me to strike and it just got worse and worse the more I tried to back away and I couldn’t move under the glee of your smile and I tried to call for help but I couldn’t move my lips or find my voice, all I could make was this sort of whistley/whispering sound and the harder and louder I tried to yell the softer my voice became; your smile grew thicker and wider as though it was eating up the skin around it and I knew perfectly well that I was only dreaming and that I had only to wake up and have it over and I looked at the depth of your smile and the disapproving sway of the snake and realized I could not wake up until I let it strike me and you knew this too, and that is why you stood there so calmly waiting and grinning because I was trapped in a disintegrating dream and you held me pinned there. So I held out my hand, very slowly, and you smiled so triumphantly it began to crack the tight skin over your cheeks and the snake’s head flew out fast and bit my outstretched hand with lusciously long fangs which didn’t hurt in the way it was supposed to and afterwards I looked down to see a strange mark like a primitive tattoo on the back of my hand just as you and the snakes began to swirl darkly around me as I finally woke up.