Waking up, my eyes blink open and there is a car screeching to a halt in front of me. The colors are bright
in the fading sunlight. Red and blue wash over me, my surroundings are a swirl
of cobalt and crimson.
The two
men inside rush out, they begin hollering and I can’t make out their hasty
words. Their shouts rise, a combination of fear, anger and perceived authority.
A crowd
appears behind me on this street corner of nowhere, I hear the ooohs, aaah sand turn to them for guidance, simply because I have no one
else to who I might turn. The mob seems to stare at and somehow past me,
watching the men that have begun to close in on me. They hold a cannibalistic
gleam in their collective eyes. A few use camera phones to document the incident.
None step forward to save me.
My head
reels with questions, the lack of answers themselves confusing; How did I get here? What’s going on? I
feel groggy; my body seems already defeated in a battle in which I had no part.
“Stop,
put down your weapon!” One of the uniformed men cries out to me, his voice
seems to crack with uncertainty.
I raise
my hands, looking over my person for weapon of any kind. I am lost as to what he
could be referring to…
Yet they
still yell their orders and press forward just beyond the front of the vehicle.
I see the lights, they seem brighter. Red, blue alternating colors, they cover
me again, now interspersed with cascading white from the street lights that
wink on to join them.
I raise
my hands, move forward to meet them, my words are nothing to me, coming out as
though I were speaking a foreign tongue. What my words were to them I cannot
say, however the two men that stood before me aim, sighting my chest as their
target.
The moon has risen over us all, and
the sun is leaving an orange, pink and purple corona. The more my eyes attempt
to focus, the more it looks like a dark brown blotch, a thumbprint smudged
across the otherwise beautiful horizon in error.
My mind screams that I should stop
moving towards them, but I’m a victim of my own circumstance. The crowd hushes, so do the men with the
guns. My eyes meet theirs, staring transfixed, I envision my fate. It is black,
cruel the barrels of dual pistols ready to fire.
At the end, cloaked in bewilderment
and sweat I notice something…. My hands still outstretched to the sky, I can
see them clearly. The skin on the wrists and hands that I’m attempting
surrender with are…brown. The skin I see is not my own. It is not the alabaster skin I was born with. Alarm
sets in, then a vague and numbing type of understanding.
It becomes clear to me that I’ve woken up in
not a dream, but a nightmare.
