Vegetable Dream

So this is a really fucked up dream that I had the other night. Sorry it's probably not that well edited because I wrote it when I was really tired, but it was too hilarious not to share. I literally had my alarm go off and just laughed in bed until the snooze alarm rang again. Uhm...yeah. It's screwy. And I know it doesn't make sense sometimes. But that's because I tried to keep it as true to the dream as possible.

PS. I apologize for the length.

PPS. Aleutia and Adrian are people who I work with. Shiloh and Sam, if you don't know already, are my best friends from high school.

PPS. I apologize for the length again.


The music is loud. Too loud. But the place is empty.

It's a small room for a concert, with an uncomfortably low ceiling, so much so that only the audience members are comfortable standing, and the performers, on the somewhat elevated stage, are forced to stoop as they sing. The guitar player sits on a chair with his head bent sideways.

All ten of us hover awkwardly to one side, clustered around a table. I remember back to when I saw Avril Lavigne in concert. This room had been packed then with screaming, sweating bodies, all throwing their arms up in the air, rocking their hearts out. It had been much louder then. Just thinking about it makes my ears and brain hurt – and makes the current band seem less aurally damaging.

I turn to Andrea. “Let's go,” I say.

“Yeah, we'll never get seats if we don't leave now,” she says.

We file out, all in our slutty lingerie. Except for Tabia. We could only force a lacy bra over her striped hoodie and that kissy-missy thong Andrea and I got her for her birthday over her skinny jeans. She refused to dress up, but you can't go to the Rocky Horror Halloween Fest wearing your everyday outfit, so we made sure she was wearing something somewhat sensual.

Rocky Horror is conveniently just a couple of floors down from where the concert was taking place (which was, oddly enough, on the 13th floor of the building). When we get there, we give our tickets and sit in the theater.

It's empty, except for three other groups of friends, each about the same size as ours. They didn't go all out when it comes to costumes, as we did, it seems. Most of them look normal. I frown at their rather pathetic attire – a hairband with a halo attached for one, a pink feather boa on another, and nothing more exciting for the rest.

Tabia turns to me. “This is boring. Why did I come, why did you make me come, that'swhatshesaid.”

“Yeah, Marta,” says Max. He flips his long-haired wig in frustration out of his batting gold-eyelash-fringed eyes. “It was so much better the last time.”

“That's,” says Tabia, “what she said.”

“We should still watch, guys,” I say. “We already paid and the theater may fill up. It hasn't started yet.”

But right then the show starts. The movie comes on, but it's hard to see because they don't dim the lights in the theater. The actors come onstage and I realize we can't see because we're too far back on the balcony. I see seats in the front row and wonder why we didn't just sit there in the first place.

Andrea's thinking what I'm thinking. I notice that only she seems to still be excited about seeing the show.

“If we move closer it'll probably be better,” she says to everyone.

So we all move.

By the time we get there, only seven rows down, the show is over. I sigh and shake my head and apologize.

“I'm sorry everyone. That was the worst show ever. I thought it would be better. I was so sure it would be fun.”

“It's okay,” says Andrea. “No one stayed till the end anyway.”

“Oh yeah,” I say, looking around at the empty theater. “I thought I heard them leave.”

I stare around at all the torn red velvet seats and rice grains patterning the ground. From the darkness I can see the angry eyes of my friends glaring at me.

“I'm sorry,” I tell them and start to cry. I can't help it. “I really am, I didn't mean it.”

No reply. They blink out and disappear.

“The actors want to meet you,” Andrea says before walking away. “They want to tell you something.”

I'm at the stage where the actors are. The one who plays Frankenfurter is washing her face. I know it was a woman who was playing him, but as she washes her face, an ugly tanned man's face with a handlebar moustache appears.

“Hello,” I whisper.

He/she stares at me, and the other actors freeze what they're doing to look at me. I'm being watched by a crowd of store mannequins. Their faces turn gray and their eyes follow my shiftings.

“We all wanted to know if you wanted to join us,” Frankenfurter tells me. “We were thinking of grabbing coffee and having some afternoon sex.”

“Afternoon?” I panic. “I'm sorry I need to go to work!”

Frankenfurter shrugs and begins to disassemble the mannequin-actors.


At work, I hear Dragon Queen playing. Aleutia wrinkles her nose and asks me what song this is and by who.

“It's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” I answer, blushing. I suddenly don't know why I brought this CD into work. They're not exactly appropriate toy-store-listening-material.

She nods absently and I go up the escalator to the upstairs of the store.

“That's like the 10th CD I've brought in here,” I say out loud.

“No!” says Adrian, who's behind me, bringing boxes to the third floor. “It CAN'T be the 10th already!”

“Well, maybe a bit of an exaggeration,” I shrug. “But at least the seventh or eighth.”

“I don't know, Marta,” says Audrey, when I get to the second floor and Adrian continues up the second set of escalators. “I don't think it can already be the 10th.”

“Well,” I say, counting on my fingers, “I have that space one...and...Regin...uhm...I have a space-themed...one...and...”

I'm having difficulty thinking and remembering. I shake my head and blink. It's foggy. I need glasses but can't find any. I walk around and blink and blink and blink and rub my eyes. When they clear, I see that I'm in the Hall building. I'm a little perturbed and hope that Hilaria won't notice I'm gone since I'm pretty sure she'll know it's not my lunch break yet. I wander around in circles, unsure of what to do when I see Shiloh. Her hair is all big and dirty and matted. She's dressed completely in baggy black clothes, with a black baseball cap and a blonde toupee perched on top of that. She looks straight forward, in a daze.

I'm beside myself with excitement and run up to her.

“Shiloh!” I almost shout, but she walks right past me and onto the down escalator. She looks like she's thinking very hard about something. I walk over to the top of the escalator and watch her going down. I know she'll look up. She has to. I don't call to her again because I somehow know that she won't hear me. She gets closer and closer to the bottom and I feel my heart being wrenched out. She has to look she has to look she has to -

At the last moment, she looks up. I smile in satisfaction and and she grins hugely.

“I thought I was dreaming!” she shouts, running up the down escalator. She takes the steps two at a time and runs at me, arms clasped around, when she gets to the top. We hug endlessly and ask questions over each other. I can't get over how terrible she looks.

“Are you alright?” I ask over and over.

“I haven't showered in days,” she says. “And I took these clothes out of the trash. But I've been in Montreal the whole time.”

“Why didn't you tell me?!”

“Because they took me. They did all kinds of shit to me, gave me all kinds of drugs. Messed me up real bad. My hair all fell out, I'm bald.”

“What?”

She nods seriously and takes off the toupee, then the hat, then her hair, and reveals a bare head with maybe a half-inch of short bristles of hair growing back. I briefly am stunned by the fact that she still is beautiful despite this.

“But I got off easy,” she tell me. “Just look what they did to Sam.”

She replaces her hair, hat and toupee and takes my hand, leading me to a room a few steps away. It's bright, and looks as if it was a remodelling of the special exhibition entranceway at the Musee des Beaux Arts. Except for in the middle, instead of benches and trees, an oval wall has been installed, and all along the outside of it are people, confined to small designated standing spaces. They remind me of horses in their stalls with blinders on before a race.

In front of everyone else is Sam. She looks bad. She's dressed up in a cabbage costume, rocking back and forth.

“They turned her into a vegetable,” says Shiloh gravely.

Sam's eyes are wide and she blinks and blinks and blinks, as if trying to see properly like I had before. “I never knew before,” she says, not looking at either of us, “but now I do, and now I'll never forget. Now I know the meaning of the term 'mentally challenged'”.

“Are they all like this?” I ask Shiloh.

“See for yourself,” she says.

I walk away and she shakes her head, standing over cabbage-Sam.

All along the installed wall are my friends. Audrey's a carrot. Bruno's an eggplant. Andrea's a pod. She giggles as the peas fall out of her costume and roll away on the floor. Her head falls off too and scoots past my feet.

“Whee!!” I hear her laugh, as her voice disappears around the corner.

I keep going all around the oval enclosure. Where there aren't people inside cubicles are costumes hung on a clothes hanger. There's a radish and a lettuce one and a leek. I shudder and walk the rest of the way to where I started.

I see Francis now where Sam used to be. He's standing though, and dressed as a cob of corn. He looks very afraid. A person, who I assume to be a member of the staff in charge of abducting people off the streets and turning them into vegetables, carries a whip beside him.

“Get into the room!” he shouts, cracking the whip on the floor. Francis jumps. “You have to pass the test. You have to know that you're going to die!”

Francis moves forward, and I follow, suddenly invisible. I see drops of what appears to be sweat on the back of his costume. As I get closer, I see that they're actually chunks of melting butter.

There's a red light next to the door Francis is supposed to go into saying stop. He stops. The man with the whip punches a button and the red light goes green. A alarm blasts, the doors open, and suddenly both Francis and I are vacuumed in to the test room.

It ends up being a hallway with a fork in two directions in the very beginning, with a sign above saying “baby digestive tract – creamed corn”.

“Is this a model of an intestine?” I shout, horrified, over the noise of us bouncing off the sides of the walls at the corners (we're being pulled forward by the same vacuum force that dragged us in). But Francis can't hear me or see me. I focus on being able to find my feet, but can't help but notice hyena laughter coming in the opposite direction, louder and louder and louder. I'm absolutely terrified.

“Are they – are they teaching you what it's like to die?” I yell.

No answer. More maniacal, evil laughter. Closer than before.

A person runs past us, with an overhead projector in her arms that looks like WALL-E.