I was back in my family’s living room, the way it was when I was a kid. Some dream settings are nothing like the original, but this one was a match. I guess I was a child again, since I stood among the knees and hips of adults as they did whatever they do when a kid wants to be elsewhere. We were all standing, I remember that, and from down where I was I heard crying. It rose and it didn’t stop, and I realized that it was a mother cat crying aloud. She was sobbing.
Darting from beside the sofa to the legs of the coffee table, a beast intruded on my vision. It was quick but once seen it was always in sight. I’d say it was longer than a cat, and the hump of its back rose a little higher. Not so much black fur as black hair, very short, and covering the thing from end to end. Four legs, a long tail like a whip, and no face. Instead its neck stretched out as long and flexible as the tail and not much thicker, and at neck’s end was a flat snout: one rectangle of flesh laid atop another, and the whole wider than the neck. No eyes, no nose; just this rectangular snout, or bill. Maybe it was a different color than tail, neck, and head, a dull putty color instead of black. But a membrane peeled back from the tip and a dark slot looked out.
The neck whipped beneath the coffee table. The mother cat was still crying.
“The kittens are getting eaten,” I said to the adults.
“Culling,” said somebody from overhead. I was one of those kids who’s always being corrected, a kid always being outfooted by adult realities, and here was the latest example. The part of me watching the dream now understood that we had too many kittens and the beast had been brought in as the solution. Giving them away wouldn’t work, I supposed. Nobody wanted kittens, or not as many as we had, or anyway I was out of step for thinking that might be the answer. At the same time, I felt that my parents weren’t so sure themselves. I was supposed to be the dumb kid who didn’t get it, but they weren’t so sure they got it either. They just went along and pretended.
Luckily the dream never showed me the kittens being eaten. I just understood that was happening, presumably under the coffee table as the adults talked.
Then the scene shifted, as happens with dreams. The child me stood on the sidewalk outside our house. Again, it was the place as it was supposed to look, not some cockeyed dream substitute. The low wall was there at the edge of our yard, and I saw the slantwise crack in the paving near the steps. I faced along the sidewalk toward the rest of our little town, and I woke up.
What was it about? I don’t know. I had an unhappy childhood, that’s all.