She woke after three a.m. tasting something in her throat. At first she couldn’t tell what it was but when she got up and went to bathroom mirror she opened her mouth wide and saw red on her tongue. Blood? she thought, why the fuck? And then she remembered the dream she was having. Her dreams usually involved sex, or some sexual theme at least. They all were strange, and this one had been no exception. It seemed to have started with her in some field toward dusk. She spoke the words “Show me your dick” but no one was around who had a dick, with the exception of a goat that was standing and staring at her in the left periphery. Goats had dicks but she wasn’t speaking to the goat. She guessed she wasn’t speaking to anyone in the dream, only that her instruction to see a dick was given for no reason at all, as if she were merely wishing to see one. Well, she had seen many dicks in her life, that’s for sure. Then she woke to that horrid taste in her throat and now here she was, standing in front of a mirror at an hour of the dead looking at her tongue and tasting blood. She wasn’t sick with something, hadn’t had any symptoms before now, so again, What the fuck? She swished some water in her mouth and gargled, then spat it out, the water reddened by her blood. The taste gone, she returned to bed, hoping to return also to the dream, but doubted she would. When she woke in mid-dream she rarely got back in bed with it, instead entering a different fuck session or sexual escapade she didn’t know the meaning behind. And this dream had nothing to do with blood, did it? No. The goat wasn’t bloody, she didn’t remember bleeding in the dream, no blood anywhere. She thought of going to her doctor but that would be dumb as fuck. What would she tell him? That she asked to see a penis and no one was there except a fucking goat and that she woke up and tasted blood in her  throat? Right. Well it would be the truth, but still. What the fuck would he say in response? He’d probably send her to some shrink or some shit like that and that would be fucking costly and ultimately useless. Maybe the blood was a fluke, maybe there was something else in the dream she didn’t notice. Now she couldn’t remember anything else about it. Field, dick, goat. No fucking blood. Next time she’d ask to see something else.

By Jeff Callico