More in short tales

clouds of doubt shadow my dreams

Every night I experience an apocalypse of nightmares. There are little explosions that shatter my past.

My worlds are blown to bits in dreams of loss and endings.

There are houses I have built for myself in the night. They crumble in the approaching dawn. Forts as sturdy as strong Romanesque pillars that hold up the meeting rooms on ground floors of my mind fall away as daylight approaches.

There are no moats separating these dwellings from the ordinary streetscape. They are easily breached.

my houses will crumble in the light of day

My palaces are cluttered and uninhabited. They offer space and constriction at once. Expansive and elastic, but ultimately claustrophobic in ways no mere dwelling can be. They are big and also as tiny as an understairs closet.
These dwellings are not caves. They are man-made, and spectacular. Their peculiarities are beyond the ordinary idiosyncracies of a baroque mind.

There are backstairs that lead to miniscule kitchens. Their magical storage rooms stocked with oddities of furnishings, lead to cozy sitting rooms full of light. These sport tables and bunkbeds in blonde wood. 

Nothing is as it seems.