Kissing In A Dream

When you wake up, you remember you have been kissing a friend in a dream.  The circumstances around the kiss are unclear – how you came to be in that position, what was going through your minds.  What you do remember is that you were both surprised, even as you were drawn inexorably together.

You refuse to tell your partner who it is, but they try and guess anyway.

“Someone we both know?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“No.”

This conversation, very early in the morning.  It might be neither of you remember it.

Then later you think about the fact that once, years ago, you had had a dream about kissing someone, a friend – a friend of a friend – and a few days later you did end up kissing that person. What was strange was that when you kissed you were standing in the same place as in the dream (though you have always wondered if this is a trick your mind played on you, taking advantage of the vagueness of dreams and the unreliability of memory).  You don’t believe in premonitions, so you can only rationalise this as something you dreamt about and, because you wanted it to become a reality, took steps towards creating the possibility it might happen.

You are thinking about this, turning it around in your mind whilst you cook-

• Flatten two chicken breasts with a rolling pin
• Beat two eggs and use to coat the chicken breasts; cover with breadcrumbs and parmesan
• Heat olive oil and crushed garlic; add a jar of passata, oregano and seasoning. Simmer for ten minutes
• Grill the chicken for five minutes on each side
  Arrange the chicken on top of the tomato sauce in an ovenproof dish
• Scatter ripped pieces of mozzarella and more parmesan
• Grill until the cheese is melted and the sauce is bubbling

and this wondering about this years-ago kissing is a kind of game now because the event is so far in the past and those two kissers are so far apart and such different people from the ones they had been when they were kissing each other.

A Man Made Of Jam In A World Made Of Wasps

This is something based off an interesting line stolen from a football columnist…

“Again: whatever you may think of him now, Harry Maguire hasn’t always defended like a man made of jam in a world made of wasps. For most of the year, he’s been fine.”

– Jonathan Liew

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/oct/05/footballs-steady-state-theory-is-challenged-by-increasingly-wild-plot-twists

…

A Man Made Of Jam In A World Made Of Wasps

I considered it one of the most unlikely and unfortunate things to happen to me during my whole life – it was the afternoon I awoke from unplanned slumber to discover that I had transmogrified into a man made of jam, and that everything else in the world had become made of wasps.

I struggled to full lucidity. Realising I had dribbled as I slept, I tried to wipe it away only to find that it was jam, that my hand was made of jam and that my face was also made of jam. By the time I fully understood the situation, I had smeared jam all over the jam.

More alarming was the moment I realised that the sofa on which I had fallen asleep was now made of wasps. My clothes were made of wasps. The whole of the rest of the room was made of wasps.

And the wasps were more than a little interested in me.

I surmised that these unexplained and unexplainable substitutions had occurred only moments before I awoke, otherwise I would already be toast. It was perhaps the act of being turned into jam that had disrupted my sleep – that or the buzzing.

The sofa was buzzing, my clothes were buzzing, the whole room was buzzing. The wasps seemed inordinately angry about something, which I felt was unreasonable. If anyone was entitled to feeling miffed about the situation it was surely me.

I wondered what flavour jam I was. Raspberry? Apricot?

Wasps crawled all over me – above me and below me and around me. I tried to get away from them, but I had no bones or muscles, only jam, so my capacity to achieve movement was extremely limited.

My jam was being hastily consumed by the wasps that made up my clothes – they were the wasps first in line for the banquet. But the wasps that made up the sofa were also getting in on the act. And the wasps that made up the rest of the room were standing by in case there was any jam left for them.

It would be nice to at least know what kind of jam I was before I was all gone. Strawberry? Blackcurrant?

There remained just enough time for me to enjoy the experience of being made of jam. I had never felt so sweet. I realised what a pleasure it would be to ooze across a slice of toast, spreading out on its warmth.

If only there were anything left in the world that was not made of wasps, it might have come along and shooed the wasps away from me – but I could see nothing to suggest anything else had survived. It was all wasps versus jam now.

And the wasps were winning.

A memory came back to me, in those final moments. I had exhausted all other options and all there was left to do was think.

I remembered one particular summer afternoon when I, a child, was being bothered by a wasp. Maybe more than one wasp. But not so many wasps that they were anything more than a slightly menacing nuisance. I concocted a plan to get rid of the wasps – it involved trapping them on the bonnet of a hot car, under a glass and waiting for them to sizzle themselves to death on it. I had lured the wasps to the hot bonnet by applying a smear of jam on the car.

I didn’t remember what flavour jam it was – but I wished I could, because I was sure this incident was what the universe was now referencing. It had taken that incident (an act of cruelty on my part) as its starting point and boiled it down (with sugar) into a microcosm. I was briefly impressed by this universe’s absurd sense of humour.

Maybe I was something exotic like quince. Or maybe I wasn’t even jam at all, who’s to say I wasn’t marmalade?!

And what if I was made of marmalade? It would render the rest of this speculation (the thoughts that occupied the final few moments of my sticky existence) null and void. Or at least embarrasingly inaccurate.

Though the end result would be the same – I didn’t think the wasps would care to differentiate between jam and marmalade, they would just carry on eating me up until I was-