An Otter Taught Me to Dream Walk

(I wrote this back in 2016, the first time t**** was president. It feels even more relevant now.)

​Close your eyes and picture a two dimensional dreamscape devoid of oxygen where gravity is 4x what it is on Earth. Now take away the oxygen and insert towering structures made of bleached bones and tiny mirrored cubes. This was my Otter’s dreamscape, and along the crumbling blood-blackened paths we have walked together.  

I met my Otter in late 2016, as the world was ending and our days were beginning to turn into a hellish gauntlet of hateful ideas and disintegrating democratic power structures. He was sunbathing on a patch of blue ice, slowly opening and closing his little fist as he watched the clouds pass over his concrete pen. “Otter,” I breathed softly, stepping closer to the wooden fence. 

Just then a large group of school children appeared around the enclosure, shouting and jostling for a good view. In a strange moment of silence a current of psychic electricity seemed to pass through the crowd. “OTTER, OTTER, OTTER,” the children began to chant in unison, quietly at first, and then with an increasing vigor.

I picked up a small stone and winged it at the nearest child. The Otter screamed and a black tunnel tore open the sky between two pine trees. Before I knew what was happening, a shimmering orange duplicate of My Otter appeared before me and closed his fist around the smallest finger of my left hand. We drifted upward toward the tunnel, the children crying and screaming below us. My Otter paused and turned his dark eyes toward mine. “Let’s Go,” I said.

A loud ripping noise happened as we entered the black hole. My clothes flapped away as coarse brown fur began to sprout from my forearms. Otter grasped my paw and whispered the opening sentences of the Da Vinci Code backwards. We were traveling inside a gelatinous hexagon of infinite formlessness, seconds peeling away from our consciousness like tattered strips of sunburned skin. And then all at once, a dark ridge of bone appeared in the distance, enveloped in a hazy cloud of atmospheric gas.  

I tried to make words and realized I had lost the power of speech. My tongue felt stiff and confused in my mouth. We saw the ridge and then suddenly we were on it, a damp cold mist clinging to our fur. “Who’s dream is this?” I tried to ask. “This is the 29th parallel,” said Otter simply, somehow understanding the clipped barking noises coming from my face. “You have been granted temporary asylum from the present.” Otter continued: “Look over there.” He gestured to a roiling pit of black sulfur I hadn’t noticed before. “That is your reality,” Otter laughed. I stared into the depths, and started to sweat.

I stared and stared. The drowning concepts of my broken world somersaulted wetly amidst the inky goo. Civil Liberty and Human Rights combined to form a sodden carcass, clinging limply to a charred rock poking out of the depths of the sulfur lake. As I watched, a wave of undulating slime catapulted upward and took the shape of the 45th president of the United States. Vomit rocketed from its rotting face hole, spewing onto the twisted limbs of the limp carcass. Otter adjusted his sunglasses, chuckling softly. “That is your dream,” he spoke, “the dream of America.”

I tore my eyes from the wreckage and tried to breathe. My whiskers began to tingle, and off in the distance the gas clouds parted momentarily, revealing a blinking tower of mirrored cubes. “Come with me,” said Otter.

To Be Continued.....