A Nocturnal Emission is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Friday, January 30, 2004. It is part of Stories.
A wet dream from which I hope never to awake.
I woke with a shuddering spasm this morning. My eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were sealed with some kind of thick, viscous ooze. The sheets were sopping wet with the same mucilaginous liquid.
My eyes, once forced open and rubbed clean, revealed a kaleidoscopic scene. The secretion on the sheets looked like a tie-dye experiment gone very wrong. There was a great mass of it spilling down off the bed and forming a puddle that resembled a peepshow floor somewhere where the johns come in technicolor.
The tissue into which I emptied my nose looked like a sticky rainbow, the colors smelled like the sea and the pigeons on the fire escape sounded like distant gulls.
The puddle of muck on the floor was swirling with little Day-Glo eddies. It was, I realized, a scrying pool filled with things from inside my head, a decanter of my memories and dreams upended on the wooden floorboards.
I could see my days spent busking on the streets of Paris. My antique Turkish sailboat was there, floating in the Mediterranean, as was my vineyard in the South of France, my monastic retreat in Tibet and my tiny, funky apartment in Barcelona. All the beautiful things I haven’t made floated there alongside perfected versions of my flawed creations.
I took a deep breath that filled my lungs like a pair of giant balloons, pinched my nose, and dove into the pool.