A dream I had last night…

“I’m looking at a scene. A quiet scene. Everything is quiet.
It’s a hotel lobby and my view is trained on the closed lift doors. These doors take up the centre of the lobby.
I guess it must be early in the morning. A night porter shuffles bags and a trolley. The man on the reception desk is almost drifting off to sleep, yet the lighting is not subdued. People may come and go all night. That’s their prerogative.
My position is filmic. I am like the camera, the floating ghost, observing the scene passively. My view rotates, eight feet above the ground.
A couple enters the building through revolving doors. I feel like I am in an elegant hotel - perhaps in Paris or London in the 1950s. The couple laugh between each other. The man holds his woman very close to him. They wear clothes (overcoats) to protect them from the wind and rain, yet they appear dry. It will not be raining now, perhaps it threatened earlier?
Nobody in the scene has noticed the lift’s arrow is counting down the floors to Ground, but I am somewhat aware.
‘Bing’ - the bell signifies the lift’s arrival and the doors slide open. A man in a trench-coat steps from the lift. His eyes are wild, he carries a shotgun which he is pumping.
Nobody reacts quickly to the situation. I hear the first shot fired and my position moves from observation to action. I swoop into the body of the young male in that happy couple, the man with the raincoat. And I feel the shotgun blast hitting me from just a few feet away.
Perhaps it is the extraordinary surprise of being thrown into the action so suddenly, but I seem to feel the huge force of the explosion, the heat and the pain (at least some of it).
Slammed hard into my chest, I am physically moved by the blast and I see the ceiling of the lobby thrown into view.
Time passes now in slow motion, I think it has done ever since the first shot was fired.
I’m soaring on a cushion of air and I am aware of the woman who accompanies me (she is my young wife) and can tell that her mouth is hanging open, in anticipation of the fall.
Confusion reigns, for her. Which noise, which impact came first?
As my head crashes headlong into the clean marble floor, my point of view switches to the night-porter and I am feeling the blast smashing into my chest yet again.
In all I am shot three times. The animosity then fades as darkness seduces.”

Gabriela y serpentia

A great serpent swept across the room. Gabriela, in a mess, balled up on a couch, never saw the creature approaching - its very body like the arc of an axe, flowing in to her.
Her life was one huge improvised sound - a near cacophony of strange buzzes and handsome clapping. In her hand, the ragged tissue of a broken heart - which looked much like the soggy tissue of a winter cold.
Cold and sheer as the tiled surface of the woman’s flat, the snake filed its body away silently in the dark cave beneath the couch. It tasted the air with shimmering tongue and surveyed the entire room.
“Room service,” called a man who knocked shallowly upon the door to her room. She looked up but didn’t raise her voice to answer. After half a minute he came in.
Interrupting the calm of the snake were the whirring wheels of a silver trolley wafting delightful aromas and leaving a stain of flavour in its wake. The serpent’s head weaved, but it seemed to sense inanimacy from the trolley and merely shifted and coiled further its body, out of view of whoever moved it.
Italicised numerals, percentages, best before dates and trademarked names filled Gabriela’s mind. The mind of a constant jumbler, a gibberer, a contrasting rationalist.
Listening hard was the creature buried below. It heard everything said by the man delivering the food to the women above; and though it understood nothing of words and languages, the intonations surely made more sense to the snake than to the woman.
Ominously, for Gabriela, the man restocking her minibar had grey hair and a fake smile. This was just the type of man she loved and she attempted to stand up and go to this man and demand that he love her back.
Backwards shot the snake as a high heel clacked against the perfect floor. Another foot landed, and the snake darted for it, biting down hard to puncture the leather.
The room vibrated as Gabriela’s lusts sank to her feet and she sagged sterilely back on to the couch. The man laughed as he shut the fridge, smiling words unintelligible to woman or serpent, before shutting forever the door to room 22A.