I Slapped Him Around Until He Left. Then He Returned and Beat the Shit Out of Me.

Fiction, or something like it

I don’t know why this nondescript Asian man was in my auditorium, but he was. I had occupied it solo, quite happily, until his entry, and I wanted him gone.

There for a purpose, now unremembered, and readying myself for a presentation if fading memory serves. He disturbed me, in a way I cannot define or describe. And, as mentioned, I wanted him gone.

Calling from the stage, I said.

“Please sir, I need this space. Please leave.”

So odd, now that I think of it, that he sat in a row of pink seats in an auditorium in a small sea of pink seats, all of them facing away from me and the stage. What an unusual way to construct a theater. All the seats were up, in the usual fold up fold down way that auditorium seats behave. Except his. His was down, because he sat in the seat.

He did not leave.

He wasn’t rude about it. He just didn’t leave.

Then he was before me, face-to-face with me on the stage, this Asian man with his occidental eyes and his soup bowl haircut and his cream colored suit.

“How did I know he was Asian?”

He could best be described as stocky-chunky, but not muscular, and short. Non-threatening and silent as he faced me. I remember his smooth tan skin and his round eyes looking calmly into my face.

“I could take him” I thought.

And then I slapped him.

He took it. Barely taking a swipe at me. Letting me dismiss and humiliate him.

It wasn’t really a fight. I just slapped him a few times, let him know who was boss and he left, defeated.

“That’ll teach him to invade my space and ignore me when I ask him to leave.”

That thought ran through my mind as I watched him exit the auditorium’s side door.

Then he returned, this calm dark-haired man with his round eyes and his ridiculous bowl haircut, and began to beat the crap out of me. Expertly, professionally, like a man who knows what he’s doing in the world of combat and has done it before.

He joined me on stage for the beating.

I was no match for his skills.

During my beating, spikes became attached to my shoes. One long sharp gun-metal spike on the inner edge of each shoes. They embedded into the wood of the stage and made me taller, considerably taller, than the man delivering my beating.

My legs, from the knees down were red.

“Fire? Blood? Fire/Blood?” I recall thinking as the blows continued.

He then kicked me, expertly kicked me, mid-calf level, laterally, over the fibula, which shattered as my left leg blew apart, like a limb that’s been frozen in liquid nitrogen.

I began to fall to the left, legs still red.

I awoke with a start from this dream wondering if I’d been shouting in my sleep.

I don’t write fiction.

But, I’ve often thought, if I wanted to, I’d use material from my dreams as I did here.

This felt extremely weird to write out. I’m thinking as I write …

“Do dreams have meaning? If so, how is that meaning known and verified? And if so, what is the meaning of this one? Will the modern-day Sigmund Freud descendants in the audience interpret this and find out something dark and disturbed about me. What of the others of you?”

But, here it is, a fiction. Or is it?

My heartfelt thanks to Terry Trueman who provided wonderful feedback to me about this story.