Fever Dream

A prose poem about grieving the death of an old friend.

Photo by Sylas Boesten on Unsplash

The day I found out an old friend died of an overdose, I had a strange dream about her.
She lived in a small wood cabin on the edge of a raging sea. I went to visit her and upon arriving she told me that she lived completely alone. When I entered the cabin,
I discovered that she wasn’t alone. There were a family of bears living with her and they were friendly until they became hungry.

There was a specific window of time where you had to rush the bears out the front door toward the sea and if you missed it, they’d eat you alive. The piles of bones stacked in each corner of the cabin were a haunting sign that this had happened before.

It was only a matter of time until the beasts came for her. The heat of hunger breathing in her face, staring down the dark throat of desire, and then nothing
but the sound of the sea, still raging outside the window.