The Juggler And His Rose by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

horrifying question was that the silhouette was making out: “Why did you do it, Stan?” The blanket of black rain-speckled cloak hiding the ghoul’s stretched out head while confining the girl suddenly shifted form. The ball of black turned into his baby blue dressed priest in his full apparel with a maddening expression of hate. In a blink of an eye, the shape-shifting creature vanished before him and his girlfriend, leaving her face down in the mud and him on his back in a delusional daze. The acid he took just minutes before his girl had taken off into the redwood trees with his phone in her hand was in full force, and he was bewildered as to what had just happened. Tammy got up and, covered in mud and breathing heavily, took off running without a word or even looking back. The blood was washed off of Stan’s head as he lay on his back in the rain, exhausted from pushing through a thornbush patch he had brushed against in his attempts to catch up. The rain only got heavier, and the woods started to get slightly foggy at the tops of the trees. Stan lifted his head up and saw no one around him. He didn’t know if he was in a dream or tripping on drugs. He reached out for a tree to help himself up, but had instead grabbed a leg of the girl who had texted him just minutes before Tammy had picked his phone up from the living room couch. The girl lifted him up by his shirt collar with a single hand and effortlessly threw him into the sky with a force so powerful that he felt the friction of the air burning his skin as everything went blurrier the higher and higher away he flew from Earth. He suddenly felt himself unable to breathe as he entered the black abyss of space, before he fell unconscious. He woke up seconds later to a bright light in his eyes on his girlfriend’s couch.
    Tammy was waving the light in his eyes to see how dilated his pupils were. He checked his phone: no text messages. He realized that it was all a bad dream. The clock on his nightstand said that it was midnight. “What did you see this time?” asked Tammy. She turned off the light and got in the bed with him. “You really need to lay off the acid.” “I dreamt that you turned into a zombie and bit me!” Stan casually fibbed. The sweat was finally beginning to cool on his brow. He had this dream for the third night in a row. He went into the bathroom, locked the door, turned on the fan, and grabbed his hidden cell phone from underneath the floorboards. The paranoia was building up. He turned on the shower and sent some emojis before he got in. He reflected on everything that had happened in the last few years, and how it had affected his life. If he had learned anything in his life, it was that the strong live on, while the weak and limiting die off. Maybe he didn’t deserve Tammy. Maybe he did. He hadn’t gone to church since he met her six months ago, and the only reason he went was for the help that he received from his fellow churchgoers, like free welfare. He was conceited, he knew, but he couldn’t put his finger on why he was repeatedly seeing the same priest in his dreams. He didn’t care about morals.
    Was there really a right or wrong after all, and if there was, was he doomed? Stan knew he was too far in for forgiveness either way. At least he thought he was. Life just wasn’t fun if he wasn’t doing something he wanted, or wrong, according to the church. And why would he want to go somewhere after he was dead if it wasn’t fun after all? At least he could be himself in hell. The girl’s boyfriend he reluctantly had to kill for his coke money in hard times wasn’t his fault anyhow, after he tried to stab him with a knife. That was all behind him now, however. He couldn’t understand why everyone in his church had taken such offense to killing. He understood that he was probably a psychopath, but he couldn’t help the fact that he didn’t feel the same way everyone else did about sensitive subjects. He was justified in