Chapter 3
It was Ken chasing her.
The dream was disjointed and confusing. It changed scene and shifted mood with alarming suddenness, but there was no doubt that the man chasing Martha through the meadow was Ken.
She knew it by the breadth of the shoulders that swung and dipped as he ran after her. She recognized the fine yellow hair that tossed back from his forehead in shimmering strands, and his blue eyes, and his wide, boyish mouth spread in ready laughter as he loped behind her through the lush field of grass.
Martha saw and felt herself running from him as if she were both inside her body and outside it at the same time. She experienced the sensation of the grass brushing its soft, tender shoots high up her thighs, their tips grazing her tingling flesh like feathers right at the line of her skirt. The meadow rippled and sparkled like an emerald sea around her as the reaching tendrils bowed and dipped in iridescent undulations before the light breeze.
On one side, the meadow's shore was lined with a forest of huge old live oaks. Their arms were spread wide to make leafy hangers for the gossamer-like curtains of Spanish moss that flowed toward the ground in gray-green sheets. Underneath the ancient boughs, the shade was deep. It beckoned to her, cool and clean.
On the other flank of the meadow, a grove of orange trees stretched endlessly in a side-by-side march with stunted limes. The plump, ripe fruits peppered the trees with ornamental balls of orange and green, throwing the sunlight off their oily skins in warm bursts of color.
At the end of the meadow was a pond of clear water, stretching to where the land rose and the orange-dotted trees marched down in files to meet its sparkling shore. The pond took the blue of the sky, deepened it, and tossed it back, adding the brilliance of a million diamonds that were dancing on its surface. Its banks were splashed with the brilliant reds and yellows and whites from the lush profusion of tropical flowers growing wild there.
Martha saw the scene of her dream in an objective way and knew that it was both strange and disturbingly familiar at the same time. She felt that it was a good place, full of beauty and life, and a youthful excitement danced through her. She saw herself glancing happily back at Ken and then running forward through the grass, laughing in joyful song.
Her full lips opened, and her golden hair streamed behind her in the sun. Her breath was warm and fragrant from her lungs, and her thighs rippled with the clean, muscular strides of girlish health and freedom. Her skin became flushed with the pinkness of her excitement and animal energy, and she laughed until her fine, high breasts felt ready to burst with the swelling joy in them, until her eyes were shining as bright and green as the grass. She ran and danced through the sunlit beauty of her dream, and yet, because Ken was chasing her-because he was in the dream with her-she was frightened.
The dream changed quality abruptly, as if a dark cloud had passed over the face of the sun. The change was startling, ominous. She glanced back again and saw a sinister, leering quality spread over Ken's face.
He wasn't loping with teasing strides behind her any more. He was coming head-on, low and fast, like a predatory beast running its prey to the ground. His muscles knotted and surged with power under his skin. He was suddenly nude. She saw his testicles whipping about his thighs like bloated, aboriginal weapons with which he would down her and beat her into submission. His cock spread through the blades of grass, parting them like the horn of a rushing animal that sought to gore her flesh.
Fear built inside Martha and made her run faster from him. Her legs pumped up and down, and her breath grew ragged, but she seemed to be moving more slowly than ever. The happiness and laughter were gone from her lips, replaced by desperate mewlings of terror.
The heavy scent of orange blossoms filled her lungs and choked her. The full fruits were gone from the groves. Instead, there were flowers at the ends of the limbs, violent red and slippery inside. They worked open and closed like hungry, consuming mouths. Flesh-colored, knobby-looking bees buzzed angrily about them, and their humming set Martha's nerves on edge. There was an angry, twisted quality about the limbs, and they weaved open and closed as if reaching out to snare her should she try to escape through the narrow lanes between the trees.
She turned and ran the other way, toward the oaks. The huge trees waved their branches at her, and the cascades of moss took on ghostly, moving shapes, like haunted shrouds from the grave.
She ran from one sight to the next in total fright, seeking escape from the sea of grass, threatening to pull her down and drown her with its reaching blades.
Coral snakes darted in rainbows of deadly color, strange sticks of children's candy someone had thrown away. A blue heron flew over her head with an alarmed cry, urging her to hurry, to run, to flee. She cried out to it for help, then watched in dismay as it wheeled up and away on frantic, beating wings. A flurry of egrets charged into the sky from the edge of the pond and sent a shower of drifting feathers back to the ground, blanketing it like snow. The butterflies that had been dancing in the grass like dainty gems spiraled high and turned to black, ugly dots, marring the sky.
At the edge of the pond in front of her, an alligator rose up through the dark water like a monster from the past. Its corrugated hide glistened wetly, and its cavernous jaws flew open like the gates of hell. She stopped in front of the beast, her path blocked, and felt the ground shake under her feet with the first gut-deep bellow from its throat. She stared at the crooked rows of long, sharp teeth, glinting from the mucoid folds of flesh in its gaping mouth. The animal roared again and crashed its deadly, heavy tail through the grass like a blunt scythe, crushing the blades to the ground. It lunged forward toward her, its log-like body startlingly mobile atop the small legs.
Martha screamed and looked back to see Ken swiftly closing the distance behind her. She turned forward again and heard the alligator hiss with the same primeval sound that had echoed through prehistoric swamps, and she knew there was no escape.
By some strength of her mind, the dream changed again. The alligator was back by the edge of the pond, now, and it seemed to be watching her in a friendly way. It was hissing and grunting gently at her, trying to tell her to slow down, telling her to go ahead and be caught.
She suddenly wanted to be caught. The idea came easily to her as being just what she wanted to have happen. She looked back at the man chasing her, far behind her again, and she began running in slow motion. Her legs rose from caressing blades of grass, stepped high and free, and sank gently down again. She was suddenly nude too, and her thighs and breasts flashed under the bright sun with her change in spirit. Mockingbirds sang in riotous song from the moss-draped oaks, and a group of pink flamingoes stood on reedy legs at the edge of the pond and twined their necks with love.
Ken was still coming for her. His expression was changed once more. It wasn't happy and good and laughing, as before, but not devilish, either. It was somewhere in between. Determined, perhaps.
She saw something in back of him that hadn't been there before. Over his shoulder, she could see her mother, watching from the kitchen porch of a house that had suddenly materialized in front of the stand of oaks.
Martha didn't recognize the house, exactly, yet there was something familiar about it. She couldn't remember having seen her mother dressed in the baggy jeans and ill-fitting, checkered shirt, wringing work-roughened hands, her face drawn and pinched with fatigue and misery. Yet she had seen someone dressed that way, looking that way.
The house was dilapidated-grayed and warped with age, its siding buckled away from the frame and twisted and dried out. Martha couldn't place the house as any she'd ever seen. Nor could she recognize the man who came out of it and tried to pull her mother back inside. He was thick and rough, his hands big, his face gnarled with whiskery stubble and base disposition, reddened from cheap whiskey and desire. She'd never seen him that she knew of, but the man knew her mother, because he put his hands on her in a coarse, familiar way.
Martha watched what he was doing. But the only meaningful thing she saw was the look in her mother's eye-the stern, warning, cynical look that told her not to be caught by Ken, lest the same dreary fate befall her, too.
Martha spun around and around in confusion. Sunlight and blue water and orange-and-green lights dotted her vision and made her dizzy. The alligator hissed and coughed and slithered toward her on knobby legs, not friendly any more. Ken's approaching image grew large, and his cock took on monstrous size, looming hugely from between his legs as thick as the alligator's warty, dark-hided, writhing tail.
She felt herself going down and down into the grass as the montage of emotions and sights spun in her mind. The cool, green shoots prickled her skin, poked into the flesh of her naked buttocks, thrust between the tender lips of her cunt to scratch the delicate tissues there with a curious mixture of excitement and pain. She smelled the sweet, loam-scented earth under her and felt secure and hidden for a moment. But then the black butterfly-dots in the sky came closer, grew larger, and changed to spread-winged vultures, circling overhead to point her out.
A huge shadow crossed her belly and blotted out the sun, and she saw Ken standing over her. His hands were balled on his powerful hips, and his nostrils flared with passion. He tipped his head back to roar with victory, and she could see his throat and chest working but could hear no sound.
The thick, trunk-like stem of his prick weaved between her thighs as its smooth, velvety tip sought the entrance to her willing cunt.
She spread her thighs wide and lifted her pussy up to meet his plunges just at the moment her mother cried out from the bowels of the house in abject despair with a cry for her to run.
Fear clamped around Martha like a vise, squeezing tightly, filling her with a dread of such magnitude that she couldn't dispel it again. She shook her head back and forth and tried to make the dream change once more. She tried to make everything in it back up to the beginning, where she was running with happiness through the grass, only without Ken this time, without the tormenting need for decision his presence always caused.
The dream wouldn't budge. Its emotion froze on the brink of rapture. His cock neither advanced nor withdrew. The pressure to yield stayed. The pressure to flee from him stayed. Nothing was resolved in her dream, and the agonizing torment of both wanting and fearing stayed frozen in a stricken tableau until she was crying out for something to give and release her from the interminable expectations twisting through her very soul.