I was standing in the fields one day, like I usually would be doing, legs deep in grass, the wind nudging my ears with things I hadn’t yet lived. The sky above me was in a shade of grey I couldn’t name.
“The weather is beautiful today.”
That’s when the horse appeared.
He jumped, upright, landing with the brutality of a ballet dancer, although he shouldn’t know how to. He had only two legs, thin and humanlike, and one of its molars, impossibly large, vibrated, producing a melody I couldn’t recognise, yet somehow remembered.
It leaned close. His breath smelled like burnt tobacco and languages. Then it said:
“But Aleksejs…”
Terrifying in its intimacy.
And just like that, it was gone.
No sound. No dust. No hoofprints in the grass.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I stood there, frozen.
Not cold.
Later, when I woke up (though I couldn’t say for sure when the dream began or if it had ever truly ended or even started), I sat on the edge of my bed and told myself:
“Was it me he was talking to?”
Frankly, no one answered. But the top left corner of the ceiling pulsed once, lightly,
And for some reason, I took that as a yes.
I guess you can say this is just about being stuck in a dream. Dreaming dreams inside dreams.