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Drugged, Shrunk and Daubed

Dreamed 2008/11/1 by Wayan

THAT DAY

I'm sick. Joints ache, especially my back. I still go to Open Studios out at Hunter's Point Shipyard and talk with a couple dozen artists. Standouts:

THAT EVENING

My friend Artemisia drops by. She's going to Starhawk's famous Spiral Dance for All Hallow's Eve. I'm too sick to dance, but we talk politics. Our town has a ballot-proposition to ignore (non-nuisance) prostitution. But it also defunds organizations serving prostitutes. Why'd the writers add that? I'm for decriminalization, but why cut services too? Artemisia says "Because those charities have atrocious street reputations among the prostitutes I know. Controlling, judgmental, exploitive... defunding them doesn't bother me a bit." OK, she's convinced me.

My friends Mike & Nic call, inviting me to a Halloween/Samhain party too. But I feel too sick. Just fall in bed.

THAT NIGHT
Brunette girl curled on blue sheets, pink pillows; watercolor of dream by Chris Wayan. Click to enlarge.
On white sheets, a nude tan curl:
skin question mark, or girl.
Slight, small-breasted. A bronze
hair-fan frames her feline face
as flame bedecks a match.
Why's she burning on this bed?

Ran off, broke, hungry, whored,
snared now by a charity, who're
sans consent ensaving her:
injected a simmery hormone stew,
regressing her body five years or so.
Her breasts smooth: chaste away.
A caseworker-scheme to render her
a scaled-up child, resexless
so johns won't pay to play.

Worse yet
they brain
wash. Blandly make the claim
"You killed
one john
though he likely raped. But you
slew two
more a few
months back, effortlessly.
We guess
you're an ass-
assin with wiped memory."

And she believes their shit! Or's it
their drugs? Glumly she
says "I'm a total blank to me.
Who knows?" The possibility
shakes me. Do I love a mad?

But I feel skeptical a tad--
aliens run this charity,
and plan to fly her to a frontier
farm-world "to save her."
Whore to sharecropper? Sure
her life was unsafe--unsavory--
But this reeks of slavery!

We're all just characters cyberpunk;
our novelist carefully paints
the girl as amoral, corrupt beneath
her angelface. You readers are meant
to buy the benevolent aliens' tale,
and to her innocent killings thrill.
O what a bold text genderbent,
to make his (of course he's male)
only girlish character kill.

She's his posterchild and tool.
Brainwashed victim, and a whore
to be exiled, desexed.
His book might as well be Victór-
ian! I'm insulted, vexed!

IN THE MORNING

Girl held in a giant hand; paintbrush writes black words on her. Watercolor of dream by Chris Wayan. Click to enlarge.

I wake. Reach to write the dream,
but every move is checked: back-pain.
Computer's far across the room.

Write in bed? But the pen and pad
by my bed are missing. Yet in
my left hand's a paint brush!
Black acrylic thinned to ink.

In my right hand...

A girl-doll, two feet tall.
It's her, to careful scale!
Naked in my fist. I paint
black words across her breasts:
"Her breasts shrank away."

But language bends to meet
her curves, by aureoles belied.
She has adult proportions, if
scaled down to just two-fifths.

So I bend her over, paint spine instead.
Smoother, but still a straggly text:
brushwork crude and slow. Dread
grows. I'll forget dream-facts.

Then she stretches arms and shifts
one foot to balance better. Alive!

But with her scaled-down brain
is she adult, child, pet or thing?
Did I mistreat her, taking small
for mindless, just like them?

I quit using Minigirl for text;
seek paper and pen instead.
She arches over still, face hid;
sighs, revealing sudden ribs.
What do I do next?

And then, and then
she's gone: I woke again.

IN THE MORNING. NO, REALLY THIS TIME. I PROMISE.

AFTERWORD

It's a month later now. I still feel regressed, not sexless inside, but latent. In hiding.

I voted as the dream said. The prop lost, but not by much. Progress is slow. We'll try again.


LISTS AND LINKS: orphans, runaways, throwaways - prostitution - weird medical procedures - metabolic dreams - more instant & vanishing breasts: Dolly Parton's Tarot, Catch-Up, Breast Bandit, Beryl's Dog Days - breasts in general - sex, triangles, and guilt - false waking - dreamwork - writing - giants and dwarves - sculpture - living dolls - nudity in dreams - politics - watercolor - the Dreamverses project - the next Dreamverse: Discard

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