I was dreaming of those Elizabethan girls.
Burlesque dancers, with their soft, downy feathers and leather gloves that
slapped across my face. They smelt of vinegar, salt, and rotting burgers and
they sang in a deafening squawk as they moved across my dreams. It was another
hot night. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of Cardiff and, even
with my windows open there was barely a breath of breeze. The dancers were
moving closer to me, sexy, seductive, sweaty. Their feather boas brushed my
face; they were closing in. I was being suffocated by them. They started
laughing, a squawking, Janice from Friends type laugh.
I woke in a pool of sweat. At first I
thought I was being suffocated by the humidity. But humidity isn’t soft damp
and smelly like the weight on my head and as far as I knew humidity doesn’t
have feathers.
When you have your window open at night you
might expect the odd moth or mosquito to fly in and irritate you, but what do
you do when you wake up and there is a seagull sitting on your face?
Seagulls are nasty bastards. If one has
ever swooped down and stolen a bag from your hands, you’ll know that they don’t
take no for an answer. They’ve got strong wings, dead eyes and beaks that would
be classed as illegal lethal weapons in 143 different countries worldwide and I
had one sitting on my head like it was king of the castle.
“Sqaaaaaawk,”
Should I move? I wanted to move, I wanted
to shoo the bloody stinking bird off me. But what if it attacked. I was naked
and didn’t think I’d like a gull pecking at me. But if I stayed still, I would
have a mouthful of feathers and a nose full of the smell of the sea in my
nostrils, and when that sea is next to most polluting power station in Europe,
it’s not the most alluring of smells.
“Sqaaaaaawk,”
The bloody thing was moving. It stood up, I
took a deep breath while I could. The
leathery webbed feet slapped my face as the bird turned around, it ruffled its
feathers and then nestled down again. The smell got worse suggesting my nose
was rather too close to the cloaca for comfort. Although the bird seemed perfectly
comfortable. It was time for action. I
had to hatch a plan before the bloody gull hatched an egg.
“Sqaaaaaawk,”
The idea was simple, move down the bed as
fast as I could and wrap my whole body in the duvet to protect myself from the
counter attack the bird would no doubt launch. I counted myself in, three, two,
one.
I scrambled. The bird flew off my face and
I managed to get the duvet around me. The gull was mad. The wings flapped, the
mouth roared its disapproval. A wing thumped me in the back. I rolled off the
bed and onto the floor and with the duvet still around me managed to get the
bedroom door open and get through it. I slammed it shut hoping to god the
seagull hadn’t come out of the room with me. I listened for a second, before
deciding the noise was coming from behind the door. I dropped my duvet defence
and was relieved to see I was alone in my flat. Okay, there was a seagull
trapped in my bedroom but I could deal with that problem in the morning. For
now, I just wanted to wash the smell of the sea off my face.
Oh I thought the situation will develop into the red warning one like in the story with the same title you wrote almost two years ago :-) This story brought the following image to my mind - one of these pictures that got stck in your head a long time ago and will forever be there: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goya_-_Caprichos_(43)_-_Sleep_of_Reason.jpg
ReplyDeleteGood memory, great picture
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