Sorry, Mendeleev

S'what's missing what makes us.

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Bruce isn't quite able to put his finger on when the dream started. For a long time it mixed into all the others, sorting below the priorities and attentions of a young man worried about his future. The dream starts just like this: at first everything is warm, and humid, and black as sin. Then something stirs very close - too close - and it isn't the right shape a person should be.

"You aren't taking me seriously," hisses the voice in the deep place. Bruce laughs, not afraid here in the dark. He has exams after all. And he can't blow his chances with Nuo Hu, she had flirted with him at study session with dark flashing eyelashes.

"Come on man, I don't have time right now," Bruce scoffs, trying to pull himself back into another place, another thought, away from an unwelcome distraction.

"Don't have time? You insufferable bone-rigged bottom-hobbler, you're asleep! When could I possibly use less of your time than now?" It says, ragged parched scraping at its edges.

"This is quality dream time! I could be in a fast car, or flying, or with a girl." Bruce hopes to signal dismissively with his hands but finds too little of himself present within the dream. They are too far in the peripheral, unresponsive, and calling to them is like dredging a sunken ship. Pull too hard and you just wake up violent, end up punching the lamp or kicking a wall. The threat of a lurching, sudden awakening stills the fight out of Bruce. He eases himself into the current of the dream and - as he concedes - more of this space comes into focus. Glimmer, Dampness, Dripping. A gaping, cavernous, echoing crampedness. Sweltering pressure and gasping thinness. Fluorescence in the dark, teal and tangerine blots. Raindrops on a lens out of focus. One seven, a quarter, three seven, a dozen forty-thirds. Not random but not mechanical; the rhythm of the biological.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Just take a look," the voice importunes. Frustration, not in tenor but in hue. A chill threads out of Bruce, burrowing out across thought, and brane, and into his meat such that his very real limbs shudder under bed sheets. His host pulls closer, but not nearer. Arms, hands. Something cupped close to the body. It offers them forward to show Bruce a secret. Its head is too wide. Far too wide. The distance between them frays into something wider-thinner. So Weird, Bruce thinks. He tries to push through the soup and stay in the moment. He has been here before. This exact instance. He sees wide flat digits, darkly silicone-translucent, unfurl from a cupped miracle.

And suddenly, seeing is no longer about light or shapes or color.

Bright without brightness, Bruce is overwhelmed by a vision of pure geometry. Lines without width, volumes without edges. Curves which only exist in one direction. Behind all of it, overwhelming it and illuminating it, an aura; a halo. A field diagram. Michelangelo, a fourteen dimensional tensor graph, and a dram of ketamine. Paint in the colors of microwave, KissFM radio, gamma-ray, and fuschia. Bruce's nose bleeds into his pillow, and he is falling.

"Yea, I know," says the voice, fading fast now. "Fucks with me to look at it too."

Puke in the waste bin.

Take two Ibuprofen.

Pillowcase in the wash.

Fall asleep in the common lounge.

Everything is okay. You're okay, Bruce.