I Had A Dream

I was walking into my house and had just stepped into the foyer and began to close the door when an intruder burst through and knocked me into the wall. He smelled like three days worth of dried sweat and the caked residue of a mustard-ketchup-onion-potato concoction. Like he’d bathed in a giant vat of In-N-Out Burger Animal Fries earlier in the week. I went for a roundhouse kick to his head. As my flip-flopped foot approached the target, a gleaming pair of steel-toed Doc Marten’s replaced the flops. My first kick landed square with a squishy whump and a crunching of bone. Viscous matter and pieces of shattered teeth splattered the wall behind his head. I kept kicking. He was yelling “ouch, ouch”, with an oddly girlish voice tinged with surprise, pain and fear. I slowly woke to the sound of my wife’s voice saying, “Ouch, you’re kicking me”. I apologized, of course, and then tried to go back to sleep. But I couldn’t. I’m not a religious man per se, and I know very little about the metaphysical or paranormal world. But as I began to drift off it occurred to me that maybe in a previous incarnation, or on a different plane of existence, my sainted wife had been less than angelic. Maybe she rolled bums for their Sterno or gaslighted orphans into giving up their milk money. And maybe because of these misdeeds in this earlier “life” she had to take it in shorts in this one. Or, “in the jammies”, in this case. Semi-convinced that I had done no wrong I finally began falling to sleep when my wife said, “You kicked me in the toes”. I said, “You had it coming, I think”.