He drank copious amounts of cough syrup and fell asleep.

At night he dreamt he was an orange-colored crab. He slipped into the dream just as easily as the drugs slipped in, real gracefully. Like a ballet in his brain. His cackled claws landed on the soft sand. Above him the weight of fathoms. Oceans. He never knew water could feel so heavy. Having remembered his earthly body from another life, he wondered how light he felt when his hair swayed around and every fat droplet on his bones jostled weightless.

Now his skin was a suit of armor, shiny and raw. He didn’t know which way to go but he went aimless, confronting bits of sea matter and dark salty stuff. In his gut a feeling of loss, strangeness. He’d never been a crab before. What if he failed at it. How can you fail at being a crab anyway. You’d only have a few things to do, eat, go, excrete, sleep. The task of living felt so huge the pit in his mind grew to a whole black hole. It swallowed him in his sleep. It crushed him. The universe contracted on him and the panic was so vast. He couldn’t see.

At night his shell cracked and he bled colors. It wasn’t liquid at all, just rays of purified colors shot out of his skin. First red and purple. He thought he could identify something like blood but it shifted, turned bright blue and crawled out of the sides. He wasn’t afraid though. The blue blushed bits of yellow in the middle, a soft canary yellow. Not threatening. Not even blinding. It reminded him of the bull shit images of auras he’d seen last week, but it wasn’t hovering over him. This was coming from under his flesh and piercing out through cracks and pores.

There was no water anymore. The darkness of the sea floor lifted to a beige carpet, he could make out every microscopic fiber. It was hairy and frayed and there was dust in it, sticking to thick little braids. Every millimeter was different. He examined the landscape with infinite curiosity like the first time he’d ever been alive. Carpet was new. Some patches were darker than others. The tickle of the tips made him smile.

He did not quite know where he was or what he was but in the dream he paced slowly and silly in and around the carpet. Carpet. It had never been this interesting. He saw ahead of him and kept on going. The speed of a slug. It took centuries to get to the end. Aware of a huge racket he caught sight of a black sole in time for the screen to blow out. Done.

He shot up startled, sticky, tense. The drums in his chest were rivals with the shattering pianos in his lungs. He wheezed and coughed so that the air around him didn’t feel like pounds of ocean. Eyes bulging and sore. His limbs, thin and mobile, grabbed at the sheets. The sheets were wet. The mattress rattled. When the figures found their way out of the dim dark of the middle of the night and he could get a sense of their edges, he realized it was just his room, it was just a dream, and he was still sick. Christ, calm down, he told himself. It must’ve been that he had died in his dream. That’s why he had to wake up. You never really die in dreams. Get close though.

An ant? Some sort of bug. Must’ve gotten squashed. Trippy dream. And the whole time all he wanted was to keep going, keep going. From one end of the room to the other, carpet and all.

His throat tickled again and he hacked out through the walls of his scraped trachea. It burned in his chest. Radiated down to his stomach.

It was 4 a.m. Dead night. Nothing moved. His room was cold so he turned on another heater. Gust of hot air. He flicked on a light not to feel so lonely. Lay his head back and popped a cough drop.

Ghosts of his creature self tugged at his eyelids. Claws curled towards him. He remembered the pressure of drowning, the indecision. He remembered the finely spun carpet fibers and the drafty pull. He vaguely felt the brilliance of colors slipping out of his pores. The emotions were so intense they still lingered there, in the slow corners of his drugged head. The lull of the sedatives pulled downward. What lay dormant under the eyes gave way and sucked him in again. This time it was bright.

This time the room had eight pillars, and a well in the center of the bed. This scene was made of old bricks and bits of grass. It was a field. A ruin somewhere in his room. The day wasn’t particularly sunny but it was blindingly bright. And a hum droned from somewhere inside the well. He could only see the edges. He imagined the hollowness inside. Truth is he was afraid of going anywhere near it, afraid the vacuum took him down. So he kept his gaze on the pillars, until they took the shape of big Corinthian columns, and then they grew vines on them and browned in the cracks. And then the vines snaked down to the wasteland ground. He was sure they’d reach him but they wormed off, safe. It was so bright he couldn’t see them go as far as they did.

He thought he heard a horn blow and the columns unraveled to reveal an old soccer field with the goals knocked down. He was clearly in the center and felt all around him at the same time, like an owl turning 360 but standing still. In one corner was a dirty net. It looked like it had been rained on. There were no seats and the drying grass went on for miles.

He felt again that pang of uncertainty, like his whole body was tethered down in different directions. He swam in great swamps of regret, deadlines to kill, work schedules, cell phones, bosses. He felt compression in his lungs, car stereos, desktops, heater hums, machines. The whiz of the dizzying made him deaf, nothing but oral exams and teeth, long brown hair, eyes, metal armor, shields, skins, lights, colors. He thought he could hear his mom, whispering promises of tea and tables, pillows, claws, goal posts, carpet, carpet. It was the pressure of snowballing years of crab. Overwhelming aurora borealis. Folds. Being a foot that crushes the antics. Being the mouth that eats at your throat.