081413 #worm Some dreams take you back to high school with your pants off. They put you on the stage without your script. They leave you to improvise; stoke you with the certainty of failure. Do what you can to survive in these dreams. That's all you can do. This dream dumps Ltiky on the couch, married. The mettle of any marriage can be measured by the indentations it leaves in the couch. Ltiky's just learning how that couch feels. How it sucks in around his thighs, how it comforts even as it sings a flatulent song of death. It's the same couch he would long for, were he outside looking in, as he used to fancy himself in his romantic, self-deceptive bachelor life. Then married life taught him how pedestrian he had really always been. At least now he had an excuse--domesticity! And so he sits there on the couch, dying lizard in his lap. The curtains are drawn against the insinuating orange of the city night. His wife--his wife--is gone somewhere, on some familial visitation. She will come home much, much later, and admit she hadn't wanted to see the lizard die. Her lizard. She had unloaded it's death on Ltiky. So Ltiky sits now, in a strange slurry of contentment and resentment, waiting for the end.