Sea Monsters

The landlord should be here in an hour or so, and my flat is clean. I didn't miss a thing. Every nook and cranny has been sloshed, soaped, or hoovered. I even wiped all the dust off the radiators, which I never do. Who the hell, after all, looks at a radiator? I know I don't, which is why they never get dusted. I scrubbed that weaselly little space under the dishwasher, and scraped all the extra ice out of the freezer. I threw away the expired food from the fridge, and replaced the plastic cup which houses my toothbrush. I de-greened the bathtub one last time (to the best of my ability, anyhow), and used a whole can of carpet cleaning foam in the living room (with no apparent effect, unfortunately). I rooted the dust out of Snarling and Scratch's ears with a Q-tip, then tried to do the same to Stella, who took my Q-tip and hid under the bookcase with it. Everything is clean. Well, there are a couple of dishes in the sink, but without those, you wouldn't think anyone even lived here.

One of two things is going to happen:

1) The landlord's going to come, peer into the kitchen over my shoulder, then scarper the minute I try and get him to replace the missing solarium door, or reaffix the loose microwave panel, or, hell, at least change the weird lightbulb in the hallway.

2) He's not going to show up at all, and I'll be stuck doing all this again next weekend.

Which will it be? Which will it be? Oh, wait--there is a third possibility:

3) Stella will bust out of her cage at the last minute, and fuck everything up.

I'd better add extra twist-ties to the gate. Stella cannot be allowed to escape. I had, in fact, been hoping she'd be asleep and out of sight, but she seems to be particularly excited today. Maybe there was too much sugar in those syrup-covered lychees I fed her for lunch. She's gone off on one of her little rampages, shaking the cage bars, trying to force the gates open with her nose, slapping stuff with her tail, and so forth. With any luck, she'll have worn herself out by the time of the inspection. That rat has the worst timing in the world, I swear. Every other day this week, she's slept till nine or ten in the evening, and stayed up bothering me all night. But today, the one day I wouldn't mind her ignoring me all day, she got up bright and early, peeping along with the seagulls, and hasn't let up for an instant.

Ah, well. Nothing to be done about it--I could sooner tame the angry sea, or keep the north wind in a bottle.

Speaking of the sea, I had an odd dream last night. It was a good dream to start with. I was doing battle with a sea-serpent, dancing on the crests of waves with the aid of flat paddles strapped to my feet. The monster towered above me, tall and dazzling as a skyscraper in the sun. Its scales were too bright to look at directly. Sail-like fins dipped and spun into my field of vision. They darted blue and green glares into my eyes, leaving red afterimages on my wounded corneas. I ducked my head down, pointing my sword by the creature's reflection in the agitated water. My aim wasn't very good. I poked through scales and left forty-foot fins in tatters, but what's one fin on a monster that has a thousand?

Taking a chance, I kicked off my watershoes and leapt high in the air. I could jump at least ten feet from a standing start, in the dream. I was like Stella, but bigger, and with a deadlier bite. I climbed the monster like a staircase, using its tray-sized scales as steps. Up and up and up I went, rounding its body in a narrowing spiral. I felt like Icarus. The sun shone nova-bright, and the world went white. Thousands of feet in the air, through a break in the cloud-cover, I could see an indistinct silhouette--you know the kind you get when the light's ridiculously intense, where the edges go all blurry and the light seeps around them? That kind. I stretched my legs and took giant bounds, spanning three, four, and five scales in a stride. It felt wonderful, like I could run forever without getting tired.

I tore through a hundred feet of cirrus clouds. Mist clung to me for a moment as I emerged, then evaporated in the heat. I raised my shield like a parasol, to keep the sun from burning my face.

Leaving the clouds behind me, I reached the foot of the serpent's dorsal fin. I did another of my giant-rat jumps and sailed straight over it, onto the shady side. I enjoyed the coolness as I leapt from scale to scale, now moving upwards in an almost vertical line. The fin rose and thickened, taller than the Faraway Tree. The shady side turned to the bloody dark side. I ran through blue-green twilight. Light pricked through bites and tears in the fin, like stars in the night sky. The scales got bigger, erupting in an iridescent ruff round the neck. Ears the size of 747s sprouted above the ruff, and between them, I could see what I'd come for: a silvery fontanelle, where the scales were as thin as tortoise shells.

Gathering my strength for a supreme effort, I launched myself into the sky from the summit of the ruff. I shot up fifty feet, then down fifty feet, sword held firm. I felt like an enormous, brainsucking mosquito, and started to laugh. I was partly laughing at the mosquito feeling, but it wasn't an amused laugh, per se--I was mosly just enjoying the moment. I could see myself reflected a hundred times in a hundred scales, and I looked like God. The sun had turned my hair into a burning halo, and my sword flashed like the sword of vengeance itself. I was smiling happily: it was good to be killing a sea monster on a bright afternoon.

Then, the head rushed up and I rushed down, and my sword plunged in so far it took my arm with it. I was buried in scalding brains all the way to my shoulder. It was a good thing too, because if I'd been attached to the monster only by my grip, I'd surely have fallen to my death. It started writhing in its death-throes, throwing itself from side to side in agony. One moment, I hung upside down in a bloody tsunami, and held my breath to keep from drowning; the next moment, I soared fifty storeys up, then two hundred down, in a suicidal arc. I closed my mouth tightly to keep insects from getting sucked in.

Gradually, the thrashing slowed, and the monster sank into the waves. I slid my arm out of its head and let the salt water carry its blood away. Leaving my sword and my shield and my watershoes behind, I floated in towards shore, and that was when the dream turned sour. Up till then, it had been a wonderful dream, one of the best I'd ever had. I shouldn't have turned around. It could've kept on being wonderful if I hadn't turned around. But I wanted to get one last look at the shining scales before they were gone. Evil or not, that'd been one spectacular monster. You don't see its kind too often. I was too late, though--there were no scales to be seen, and no fins, and no monster. Well, there was a monster, but not the sea monster. Floating on the waves behind me, half his head missing, was Hated Enemy Steve. Worst of all, he was still alive.

"Help me," wheezed Steve. His voice sounded sad.

"No," I snapped, as the playful cirrus clouds turned grey and covered up the sun. "You are ruining my day. Why are you here?"

"Please," he begged. "It hurts. The salt water is getting in. Oh, please! At least get me back to shore. Don't let me die like this. It's my worst nightmare. I hate the water."

"You shouldn't have been a sea monster, then."

"Please!" He begged and sniffled and stretched out his hands for my sleeves. I swam away as fast as I could, leaving him to die horribly in the sea. His terrified screams followed me, but I ignored them. The last thing I heard before he went under for good was "At least kill me quickly, then!" I ignored that, too.

I'm not a good person any more, I thought, as I scrambled out of the water. I'll never be able to think well of myself again.

And then I woke up, annoyed that my ridiculous guilt complex had gotten all the way into my dream. In the dream world, I'm supposed to be able to kill Steve as brutally as I like, and enjoy it. There isn't supposed to be...realistic pleading, sort of thing. There can be movie pleading: "You wouldn't dare! Don't pull that trigger! You little--" (Bang.) "Noooooooo!" (Croak.) --but not the sort of pleading you'd have to be a monster to ignore. Steve has to die in a way I can feel good about, being a dirty rotten bastard right till the end. He can't look human, or there's no pleasure in it.

Probably a good thing I never got around to knocking him off in the real world, eh?

As I was finishing up with the description of my unsatisfactory revenge dream, the landlord turned up. He gave the place a cursory examination, made excuses for his failure to fix any of the broken things, and remarked on Stella's extraordinary size. Irritated at his vague replies to my questions about getting the solarium door fixed, I demanded that he take my mail to the post office on his way out, which he did. (Well, I more asked than demanded, but what was he going to do, say no? Ha, ha.)

I think I'll go and drink a lot of Coke now, and pile the cans up all over my desk. It just isn't home without at least one soft-drink platoon encroaching on my mousespace.