Metaphysical Short Stories

A piece of a dream came back with me. It stayed with me the way smoke from a campfire hangs on your clothing. This fragment was a face. Clear, vivid and I cannot say it was a human face. It was humanesque, definitely. The forehead was high, with a rounded point for the chin. The cheeks were made even flatter by comparison with the enormous cheekbones. The ears were much higher set than normal. It was as though a human face and cat face had merged. By virtue of the vesica piscis pupils, the eyes were a most feline feature. The irises themselves were a blue green with some yellow green fibers. They glistened. A growth of fine orange hair covered most of the countenance adding emphasis to the pointed tips of the ears. A blonde mane cresting along Bela Lugosi’s hairline finished the look. A second fragment accompanied it. This piece of the puzzle was in words: “All enabling is compassion.” A syllogism, you know like, all trees have a bark, all dogs have a bark, and therefore all dogs are trees. I know dogs and trees have a relationship, but this just isn’t it. It makes me wonder what Aristotle would make of it, or was this just residual trauma from those S.A.T.s? My first fully awake thought of the new day was, “I’ll start a dream journal.” My next thought was, “Lets see what’s for breakfast.” The sound of the refrigerator opening summoned my cat Furrieous. Cats are attracted to refrigerators, just like magnets. In cat telepathy, I knew that he knew, that I had opened the fridge to get him something to eat. When I looked into his face a piece of the dream triggered. This dream had been part of a class set in some Founding Father’s campus. You know, the ancient, but well maintained architecture, surrounded by even older trees. I could picture the very hall in which it had taken place. The floors were polished with the steps of a googol of alumni. The room was filled with late afternoon sun and the smell of millennia. There were already a number of students gathered, which apparently included me. Now here’s the thing, I was the only human. We were all bipedal and equipped with lungs, but I was the only human. We began discussing courtships and family on our various worlds when the cat-humanoid entered. He held himself in that regal, unconcerned way in which a lion surveys the Serengeti. His forearms were massive with hands that were wider than long. Each finger ended in a tuft of fur and I wondered about retractable claws. We all greeted him and he introduced himself as Aphwyrr (It was pronounced as an exhaling breath, a breath you’d spin a pinwheel with. Almost with a whistle sound as you blow out the air, the head raising at the end, A-fwee-her, only smoother). He seemed some how familiar, preternatural even in this recollection of the dream. I caught on that different planets have different species achieving dominance. It has something to do with who climbs out of the primordial soup first. They pretty much eat everything else that follows. On our planet it evolved into the monkeys, who ran for the trees as soon as they dried off. Apparently bananas were easier to peel than all those smelly shelly things. An ancient clock chimed three and the professor arrived. He was the furthest from the new norm I had developed in the last few minutes. He had an exoskeleton in a bright beautiful green. This color segued into a purple-brown like a suntan. His head was a rounded tetrahedron (upside down) with enormous eyes on the upper two facets. He was a praying mantis. Still, he stood on two legs and ran a set of lungs. He introduced himself with a buzzing sound. I don’t seem to be able to assign letters to it. I heard more buzzing sounds and understood that class would be about compassion. Like any good student I immediately stared through the window. This window was somehow the very window in my apartment. I saw that homeless guy that always waits for me to go out in the morning. He looked back at me, I looked away and I found my self back in class. The classroom had shifted; we were on a boat in very deep water. The good professor was explaining that we were going to jump into this water and float for four days. Then he’d be back to pick us up. A large number of things went through my mind. An even larger number vied for positioning to come out my mouth. Finally I thought, what the hell it’s only a dream. What was not really clearly explained was that there was only one flotation device for all of us. We had to take turns. Only one of us could rest at a time the others had to hang on the device and sort of kick to keep from drowning. By the second day we were all exhausted. Far more that any of us Aphwyrr detested the water. Being in the water was one thing but getting his face wet was just unacceptable to him. We regularly gave up rest time to accommodate the cat’s dislike for water. This was quite a strain on the group. He always watched the horizon. Naturally, simply, as though ordained, he had become the alpha of our class. Around sunset on the third day, I’d had it. Aphwyrr was on the flotation device. No one else seemed alert and so I decided to just slip away and drown. It made perfect sense to me. Down I went. I knew all I had to do was give the order to start breathing and I’d be gone in seconds.