Deviation Actions
Literature Text
“Bovines? On bicycles?”, Muriel gawped at me like a great fat flounder. She stood in the doorway to my station room wearing the same drab pantsuit as she had the day before, her grey-speckled wings just grazing the ceiling. “Are you serious?”
“What? I thought it would be funny!”, I said as I flashed a cherub’s grin.
“You are a dream technician, you are not paid to be funny.” She glowered at me over her clipboard. “You are here to provide mortals with the insight and guidance needed to reach inner peace!”
Here we go again, I thought.
I had been working in the Dream Department for about a decade now and was finally nearing the end of my probation period. In that short time I could honestly say that it was the most pointless job ever conceived at Divine Intervention, Inc, or in the known universe for that matter. The hours were terrible, the pay was a joke, and it was exactly as boring as you think it would be to slog through the psyche of whiny, selfish humans every night and attempt to interpret what metaphysical mental anguish is holding them back. Oh, and then your supposed to use symbolic imagery to turn a little lightbulb on in their soul and everyone gets the warm happy fuzzies.
Of course they just wake up and in a flash, all that hard work gets forgotten. Even if they do manage to remember… nobody actually listens to their dreams anymore.
To top it all off, I get stuck with the one supervisor who actually takes all this seriously. Muriel fancied herself a “muse-in-training”, destined to sit at the shoulder of the next generation of artists and poets. She’d been waiting for that promotion for about 300 years now, even so, she liked to remind everyone at staff meetings how she inspired Picasso’s unconventional style thanks to a series of dreams she oversaw in his twenties. I rolled my eyes.
“I saw that,” Muriel snapped, eyes bugging out of her skull as she began her usual theatrical performance. “Inner turmoil rules the dreamscape! If left to their own devices the chaos could leave a mortal unrested and tormented the whole day.”
“And civilization as we know it could collapse!” I gasped.
The woman glared daggers at me.
“Oh, come on Mimi,” I said. “Seems to me like no one remembers this junk anyway, why not give ‘em a laugh if they happen to wake up?”
“YOU are here to inspire mankind. You are here to communicate epiphany! What possible message does a heard of bike-riding cattle convey?”
“Don’t eat nacho cheese before bed?”
“Eurgh!” Her face was turning a very violent shade of purple as she puffed up twice her size. I stifled a laugh.
“Alright, alright, how about this? The cows represent maternity and motherhood, and the bikes mean… uh yeah, it means movement! This person needs to embrace their maternal nature in order to move forward in their life.” I beamed in my seat. Muriel knew as well as I, that as long as there was some pseudo-Freudian psychobabble to back me up, then I’d never be disciplined. Heck, it was quickly becoming my favorite part of the job.
I looked up at Muriel’s face, expecting to see those varicose veins ready to burst. But, instead I saw a sight that would make a demon pale.
She was smiling.
She held up the client file in her hands. “Maternity is it? Well, according to this file here, your charge is an eight year old boy, who… would you look at that, just happens to be terrified of cows. Didn’t you check the specs?
“I- what?!” I yelled as I toppled out of my chair. “But, that’s not what it said before!” I scrambled frantically to my feet and switched the monitor back over to Dreamview. The cows had already grown twice their size and were resembling minotaurs on wheels every second. The young boy scrambled away helplessly, the advancing army always two steps from his heels.
“Not what it said before…” Muriel repeated slowly. “I’m certain that will hold up in Standards, don’t you?” Like a shark soothing a shoal of baitfish, her grinned widened as she backed out of the room.
“Let’s see you talk your way outta this one sweetheart,” her whisper lingered in the room as the weight of the situation crashed on top of me.
I watched as the screen grew darker and darker, the boy being dragged deeper into his worst fears personified, but even as I sat there awaiting my own doom, I had only one thought on my mind…
Who the hell was afraid of cows?
