This Is What I Write at 3am

No apologies, no explanations. This is what you get:

Yellow and Red

Mom was acting funny.
"The robots," she said. "The robots are, they're talking to me."
"What robots?" I asked.
"In the teevee, in the computer."
"Mom," I tried.
She turned around, slid the drawer, and pulled the biggest knife I'd seen in the house.
"Mom, please. Stop."
"You don't understand, Ingrid, they want me to destroy."
"Destroy what?"
"Everything," she said and forced the blade into her neck. Blood. So much blood. "Everything." She dropped to the ground, mumbling "Yellow and red. Yellow and red."

The home computer was glitchy, kept showing abstract images of rings of yellow and bars of red. I watched only for a few seconds before getting dizzy. Yellow and red.

Pulling the cords under the desk seemed to do nothing. The monitor would fizz out and then pop into life with the same images.

And there was a hum. I smashed the monitor and waited for a second only to hear the noise from upstairs. It was tilting my brain, making me just a little bit mad. I was waiting tables at a bar I'd never been to. Someone asked why I hadn't been there to pick up the slack. "I can do it," I said. "Then why aren't you here?" she answered.

The car's dead and I'm making a quick stop at the gas station down the street and I'm looking for a bag of Funyons. Funyons. But they're out and there's no beer and the only energy drinks they have are warm. Funyons. Yellow. And red.

I'm back in the living room and Mom's still alive and the remote I have has a big ON/OFF switch but when I walk to the television, I can't read it and the fizzled signal is pulling me in. I want to be a piece of face on the clothesline outside. There are already three out there, smiling, waving in the wind, flapping with the wandering joy of resignation. And I go out of the room so I can read the ON/OFF button and hold it and walk back in to flip it - and I do. And the television goes off, but only for a second, and back on. And yellow and red and yellow and red.

I feel myself going, losing my ground, but I run upstairs and I'm late for work and so ashamed because I haven't been in for a few days with no excuse and I'm just waiting on getting reamed out, waiting on getting fired. And the computer monitor is humming at me, is strobing yellow and red and I'm in an ocean-front hotel room and the giant wave is coming and I don't know how to avoid it, don't know why no one is not running away. They're all staring at me. And the wave is coming.

The television is still humming and mom is on the floor. Red. Everywhere.

"Why aren't you helping me?" I shout to no one. I run around the house pulling cords from the walls, but the humming only grows. A plane passes overhead so, so closely and crashes a few miles away in a ball of fire. Red and yellow.

Everything is pulled from the walls. The television is still on, playing a version of Super Mario Brothers I've never seen. But it's pulsing, pullling me in.

I run upstairs, turn on the shower, get to my room where the pillows are pulsing. The people-faces from the garden are stretched out, bleeding on the mattress. I can't stop anything. I can't keep my mind moving outside of the yellow and red cycle that's taking my head out. The alarm clock is even doing it, somehow making colors where there should only be sound.

We can't keep it. We can't.

The colors are daunting, consuming, and so, so wonderful.

And so: blood.