dreams of steel

Eddie goes below, lies down and falls relentlessly to sleep. He’s in the back of a car. Someone is smoking. His throat closes in the way it did whenever his dad smoked in the ‘57 Bel Air. He takes short gulps of air. There’s a woman talking in the front seat about the terrible loss of steel manufacturing in the United States but then she’s on top of him, kissing him. They’re startled by a sound outside. It’s another car. They watch as two men begin hammering a steel I-beam. The woman, he can’t make out her face, says that they hammer the steel to make a loud sound. He wants to know who she is, but her face changes every time she turns her head a different direction. She grabs a can and begins spray painting a demon onto a wall. The men laugh at first. The paint dries, the demon stares, the men die. The woman begins to sing. She floats in midair like an angel. Her song is the most beautiful thing. She knows everything. He hopes she won’t tell. Realizing he’s nothing but a machine to be operated by her, he tries to run but he’s paralyzed by her song. He's not sure how long it will go on, but he wants it to last forever. It might. He doesn’t understand why the song is slowing, or why things are stretching and turning blue, but he feels like he’s being pulled into a shrinking swirl of dark. He panics. It’s one of those. It’s always the same thing. He’s looking for something, he goes into a room, and then another. Each room gets smaller and smaller until he can barely move and then he realizes he’s in a tiny space with no doors at all and no way to escape.