I Dream The Suddenness of Violence

It was a simple dream, almost just a fragment. I was sitting in a comfortable chair reading. A man stepped from the next room. I saw him in my peripheral vision. He had a pistol. He raised it and aimed. I twisted to the right to try and get out of the chair. He fired. The bullet struck me in the left side of the throat, just under the jaw line. There was no pain, just a sudden sense of shock. I closed my eyes and fell deeper into sleep and at the bottom of sleep I woke into this world.

I've often said, only half joking, that the only thing I fear in this world is that God is Just. Though I live an entirely different life now, in my youth I had an intimate acquaintance with violence. Like an old friend those days come back now and then to haunt my dreams, to haunt me.
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