A fire, glaring off his eyes, breaths around him.

A house. On fire.

He looks at his hands covered in a dark green ooze. Shiny specks, glimmering like glitter, populate the goop like a sky full of millions of stars.

Panning his gaze to the window, he sees the world on fire, an orange cacophony of shrills, yells, and pained screams. He begins to cry. There is so much pain: In his lungs from the smoke, on his finger by the whim of the fire, by his ears experiencing the torture of human fears, and through his dry eyes where he is forced to see the hellish punishment.

No weeps can extinguish this fire, but the light begins to dull anyways.

Amon awakes in sweat, still bound by the tiredness in his body. Removing his covers, he shivers out of bed. A tentacle, texture like melted plastic, hangs onto his hand.

“Not you,” he says as he tugs.

The creature stirs under his bed, a gibbering moan originating from an orifices. It’s limb pulls slightly on Amon’s hand, a spectral light zips between their grasps.

Amon berates as he pulls harder, “Stop giving me those dreams. They scare me!”

It clicks back at him, the black ooze.

“Get off of me, you demon! I don’t know what you are!”

Holding a metal water bottle above his head, he threatens the thing under his bed. It begins to hiss back, a monstrous, wet hiss.

“Go away, get out of my house,” he trembles knowing the creature has yet to leave and probably will not. It had been under his bed all night.

It backs into the corner, offering it’s limb out.

Amon succumbs to his fear, and he tugs the unwilling ooze from out of the corner. It struggles. It bites him. He bleeds.

Using the weight of metal, with swings pushed to the limit from hot adrenaline, he beats the creature, until his hands are covered with it’s black juices and the metallic smells leave his hands.

He stands there breathing heavily, shaking. Exhausted from fear.

He slouches against the wall observing the limp corpse with teary eyes. A few nips dot his legs.

After a few moments of delusional contemplation, a light from across the street fills his room. Wobbling to his feat, while his hands drip the sparkly goop, he sees the searing orange outside: A building doused in fire that moves like the sea, a petroleum truck crumpled at the front window. And, in the wake of the fire, screams are muted just beyond his glass window.

The view is all too familiar.