Shania Twain Hillbilly Nightmare

Ever since the Floods, Irene’s nightmares were worse than ever…

Shadowy figures on the horizon. Chasing her. Knifing through trellised shadows, craggy mountain tops, cold forests…

Irene didn’t know exactly who the figures were. She just knew they were after her.

The offenders she styled as hillbillies, country hicks. Rednecks. Some had skulls visible under their skin. Some were shadows. The offenders often emerging from afar, from dark air, running roughshod, like wolves, through the forest…

Her menacing hicks in grease-stained overalls… Others berobed. In robes of red. Cold trickles and bloody noses peering from underneath the dark corona of their cowls…

… hicks lying in wait with crossed eyes, gaping mouths, cracked, dirty lips. Hicks whistlin’ Dixie in the darkness…

But the hicks generally wouldn’t scream or speak to Irene, aside from yeehawing. Most of the hicks only hissed like striking vipers… venomous silvery sparks leaping with their spit as the hicks’ red robes went snapping with the wind.

The heaviest hicks stalking Irene under skies the color of a corpse…

… Hicks’ breath fogging, blood streaking down the bumpkins’ faces as the aggrieved hurdled toward her… running as bulls escaping the rodeo… the hicks’ pulling penis petting-zoos like pits of snakes… outstretched hands clawing up from the ground…

The hicks’ cold fingers crawling up and over Irene’s limbs like cockroaches…

In these dreams she’d run. Barefoot. Through the forest. A hunted animal. Irene in Daisy Duke hotpants and a Hulkamania T-shirt. Freezing winds stealing her screams.

Her feet frozen, Irene ran wheezing, her wild bursts of breath becoming clouds of crystals sparkling silver-blue in the white wilderness… The forest floor opening in front of her as a treacherous carpet of rotting leaves. An icy surface crackling, crunching. A minefield.

In these dreams, the Shania Twain song “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” was often following Irene, playing from somewhere above. The twangy guitar melody, bass pounding in deep booms. The song maddening her as she panted and ran on dumb feet; menacing hicks’ hisses sounding from all around, the cacophony of noise ever louder.

The hillbillies closing in.

Cold touching her skin, in these dreams Irene shook tremulously, puke caught in her throat… In these dreams, whichever way she ran, the rednecks were there, in blood-colored robes, filthy overalls soiled as used toilet paper; their whiskery, leathery faces like ghouls.

But the hicks then burnished into the back of Irene’s eyes as she’d scream awake to silence. Her jaw then clenched with such force her teeth might shatter…

Tangled in her blankets, twisting this way and that, Irene would then clutch at her sheets like a parachute, waiting for lines of light, for night to melt into morning.

… waiting for her cornbread, for her hillbillies to hide like cockroaches from the sun.

Then there was the recent spate of truck dreams. Clattering along a crescent-shaped road in snow-capped mountains… Moonlit hills… Hoary peaks… Colossal cauliflower trees growing taller. A pale white haze deepening the distance.

The vehicle, a Ford F-150 pickup, was covered in Confederate flags, MAGA stickers and was driving itself, forcing on, fast as a demon. “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” again blaring… An Irene’s hands handcuffed to the wheel… Disdain stirring, tremors of rage overtaking her as she gritted her teeth. But she let the vehicle fall forward. Kept quiet as a painting.

After all, politeness was her pedigree. Even in nightmares, Irene would remain a smiling woman. Wouldn’t let the cracks show.

Even in nightmares, she knew a smile would be the perfect panacea. That a perfect smile could keep her teeth from falling out…

♪… Just like I should… ♪

… drew in a draft of wet air, felt her front teeth loosen along with the muscle spasms, then let the wheels rock on…

♪ … if I can have you for life… ♪

The pickup shaking, rattling. A human shriek, then a “yeehaw!” coming from under the wheels… Irene would worry the truck’s wheels might pop off and she’d be stranded in the cold mountains, alone. Alone and handcuffed to a heap of iron. Or chased into eternity by fat hicks piggybacking smaller hicks, mountain lions ridden by hillbillies… Hunted like a pig by Forrest Gump in a Bigfoot costume…

An Irene vanishing… a suicidal snowman jumping into a sweet tea jacuzzi.

As a city person, Irene had long been terrified of wide-open spaces, rural areas. Especially mountains. Mountains scared her most of all. The altitude. The dense thickets of trees, scrub, bushes. The invisibility. The likelihood of avalanches, forest fires, flash floods… The inevitability of hicks, hillbilly sightings…

Just what were mountains anyway? Chunks of the inner earth jutting up. The Earth’s ugliest teeth… The Earth’s vaginal dentata…

Mountain people especially horrified her. Scared her worse than circus clowns. Even before she watched the film Deliverance, but after that…

She pictured country folk as meth addicts, doomsday preppers, rapists, freaks who fucked their family members, tall obese men with scruffy ponytails, oil-stained overalls, mouthfuls of missing teeth. Mullet-headed monsters who smelled of body odor, ate roadkill, and watched NASCAR. People who belonged to hate groups. People who drove monster trucks with those big garish tires tall as boulders.

The sort of people who thought professional wrestling was real…

The news coverage of the Floods’ devastation was unavoidable, and Irene’s dreams kept sliding, becoming darker… In her darkest dreams, be they alone in the woods, or in a bumpy truck, she could feel the creep of a colder emptying… And the hillbillies were her culprits. Even if millions of hicks were amassed underwater, in watery graves… or be they running toward the tornado in the trailer park…

Her hicks were privy, collecting Irene’s debts. Her every breath fueling their fury. Burning their Bibles. Her antagonists malicious, colder than shirtless men on Cops.

Irene’s scariest dreams had come to feature hillbillies’ tongues, their salivating, sloppy wet tongues licking over her naked body. The hillbillies airborne. In flight. Flying by her. Kamikaze. Fast as fruit bats. Hicks themselves slack-jawed and singing twisted, falsetto karaoke versions of Shania Twain songs to the sounds of distant farts and burps. The hillbillies aloft, tongues jutting out like madmen. The hillbillies licking Irene’s face and neck as they flew past before repairing to bare, snowy branches… in distant trees, like the hands of skeletons clawing at the sky…

The rednecks hiding in tree branches, slapping their bellies, screaming snow off the mountaintop. The flying hicks barking like angry dogs yet remaining patient as vultures.

… or Irene alone, naked, lost in the woods. Freezing in blue skin. Seeing no hillbillies, but sensing and suspecting the mountain folk hunting, walking on all fours, peering from tunnels, abandoned mines. The hillbillies wiring banjo-bombs, setting beartraps, spitting watermelon seeds in her general direction.

“Not giving a fiddler’s fuck.”

In these dreams, smells were stronger, and Irene could smell alcohol, like a rubbing alcohol, and sense the hicks, in their hovels, sipping moonshine. She’d sense rednecks constructing outhouses with bed-of-nails toilet seats, torture chambers for urbanites…

Then there were her recent dreams of hillbilly sister-wives, daughter-wives, the hillbilly witches… Irene was terrified of them too… The vile, fat, bubble figures pointing at her from afar, hitchhiking via middle finger… The witches creeping and crawling on the side of the road, slow as the tides…

Irene hated the witches’ round faces, their sickly ashen hues, their ragged clothes. The witches dressed in tattered robes of red. She knew the hillbilly witches were onto her, floating like ghosts up in the mountains… Woods witches uglier than Marjorie Taylor Greene… … with broken teeth and blotched faces, close-set eyes and weak chins… Cunts stealing the cotton from clouds…

Irene knew the hillbilly witches as total fucking terrorists, feeding on shadows. The redneck witches omnipotent as her every fear.

♪… Don’t try to run…♪

Irene was sleeping fitfully and waking at 3:30 a.m., pretty much every night, her mouth dry with dread. Then she’d jump out of bed, pad over to the bathroom, her slippers whispering across the marble floors as she squinted her eyes.

In the pink of her bathroom, she’d open the lights to spot her reflection, and she’d see her face puffy with sleep, her hair like a bird’s nest, her age showing, her frown lines deepening, crow’s feet digging into her face like claws.

Irene wanted to blame the light. And she knew that she should stop watching the news, the Floods, the live feeds. But she just couldn’t stop.

… Irene sometimes wished she could hear her father and mother’s voices. She wanted to remember what they sounded like, as she heard them, not as she remembered them, not as they sounded on tape…

… Her fleeting images…. Father and his gayness… Her gay father and his manicured hands, his Audemars wristwatch… His anthrax evenings, glory hole at the ballet…

Her mother, the couch creature believing in Coca-Cola, commemorative plates, spoons from each state… Her mother never ever stressing the initial syllable in “insurance” or “guitar.”

… Her mother’s trembling phobia of elevators… Her mother walking up and down 15 flights of stairs…

The family once cloistered under a chandelier that looked like a billion bits of broken glass…

So much of Irene’s life was spent in the air. In the sky. In her high-rise apartment. At her job. In a spiraling office tower, with its silver trim and gold-tinted, glass-plated windows. Its ergonomic furniture and sweeping city, park views.

Sitting in the office, under butter-soft fluorescent lights, she’d gaze out at the window washers dangling from adjacent skyscrapers. The window washers held by harnesses and ropes, the men and women pushing their squeegees, sweeping scrubbers over windows.

And she’d watch them as they descended in their boxes, as they were hanging outside her window. And she’d wonder what that would be like, to be a window washer. To be in a dangling box, high in the sky, scrubbing muck off a window.

“Scrubbing a toilet is a human experience… But scrubbing a window? Even at the Burj Khalifa?”

Most of the window washers kept their eyes focused on their work. But one, a youngish, handsome man, with gold-colored skin, wavy, slicked-back black hair and a cute, crooked smile would sometimes glance at her, his wry smirk growing rounder.

Their eyes would meet like lasers. But coyly she’d look away. Then he’d look away, return to his work, and she’d resume watching him, watching his rippling biceps, his strong jawline as he’d push his brush, misting her windows with suds.

Despite his being so handsome, there seemed a desperate fury to him, a saturnine tilt to his big brown eyes, she sensed, as if his eyes were two bottomless pits of pain. Yet his boyish face retained a certain purity, an innocence, like a puppy dog’s…

“Hit’s a’ hunger,” a hillbilly witch in the passenger seat whispered. It was a terrible telepathy. The woods witch, with a face like a pile of shit, was opening the Ford pickup’s door as the truck sped up a twisting, snow-carpeted mountain road. The witch then sprang from the moving vehicle, and her whole wide body shattered like a glass bottle as she bellyflopped onto the road, then disintegrated, white as ice, molting in with the snow.

The Shania Twain song, “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” started playing loudly, the bass bumping, blood dribbling from an Irene’s ears…

Then another pickup truck dream. And Irene was the truck. Her hands and feet were wheels. A cell phone shoved up her ass. And Irene was on all fours, like a mechanical dog, careening downhill, on a curvy dirt road where she passed by another hillbilly witch as the Shania Twain song “Up!” sounded from Irene’s ass.

The witch was by the side of the mountain road, the road leading down to a diorama of a cookout at Capitol Hill… The redneck witch in a Shania Twain mask, the redneck witch pointing a big black dildo, carjacking an ambulance driven by Theo Von… The ambulance’s sirens silently flashing blue and red…

♪… I’m goin’ up… ♪

Then Irene was not a truck. She was outside of any truck, in another white wilderness, under a night like a veil of dark silk… An Irene in a chicken suit, standing opposite a chunky, naked hillbilly witch, atop a frozen hilltop.

The witch’s teeth were black as bugs, and there was a curious gray misting creeping forth as banjo music in the background was battling the hiss of an icy wind.

Then the mist changed colors and became a great green fire that licked over and swallowed the naked witch, then floated like a spongey fog. The mist funneling, eating into Irene’s mouth, burning like a scalding hot tea down her throat before squeezing her lungs as if they were balloons to be popped.

Gasping for air, Irene awoke to a pool of sweat, and lay comatose, awake but asleep until sunrise, wet and heavy under her slicked sheets.

The handsome young window washer began to appear in Irene’s dreams. The window washer and she in the Ford F-150. The pickup truck on autopilot, driving itself, as she and the window washer set their feet on the dashboard, played and poked at their bare hands, pretending they had phones, pretending they were palm readers.

Whenever the window washer was in the truck, it was peaceful and holy. She’d feel a comfort, a warmth, like being wrapped in a heavy blanket on a cold winter night. “From This Moment On” would be playing from the pickup’s speakers…

But there were other occasions when the window washer was air, and another man would appear in the vehicle. Another berobed hick. A bear of a man. A man with a shaved head and a long beard, a beard as long as a Taliban fighter’s. But this bear’s beard was red, fiery red, as if a burning bush were floating over his face.

Once the bearded bear would appear in the car, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” would start playing… Irene’s front teeth loosening… The truck turning cold as a freezer. Irene drugged with pain and misery; her tongue heavy as a brick. Irene gasping for air as if choking on a chunk of ice.

The pickup then speeding up and driving off a mountainside… Plunging into a lake of blood… The music abruptly stopping, the needle scratching off the record as walls of dark red water cracked open the pickup truck’s windows, flooded the vehicle. The red bear swinging his head toward her, crying out through his huge beard, “YEEHAW!!” as all the life in Irene’s body froze in her veins…

Irene’s next series of dreams were soundless and centered around heights. Jumping off tall buildings. Jumping off mountains. Jumping off bridges.

The jump. Then the falling. Feeling the purity of gravity. The pull, the suction of the force. But, every time, she’d wake up right before hitting the ground or water or pavement. Right before impact, she’d jolt awake, her mouth bone dry, her throat clenched. Sweat sopping the sheets…

Enough was enough. So Irene decided not to sleep anymore. Sleep had gone from a burden to a torture. The truck dreams, the flying hicks, the jumping dreams, the bearded bear in the car, the woods witches, the hillbillies building torture chambers. There would be no more of this.

No more Flood feeds either. She was done with it all.

Once again, an Irene had flown in a squirrel suit to work, listening to Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” on repeat, via telepathy.

It was a hideous morning. The wind heavy and wet, pregnant with frosty rain. The sky sloped, covered in sinking clouds, gray as a rat.

Outside the towering office building’s front entrance, it was a mob scene. A window washer had fallen to his death. His body, facedown, was in a starfish pose, the fresh corpse lying in a spreading pool of purply blood…

As Irene descended, she ignored the jumbotron displaying the latest Flood devastation. And Irene didn’t want to recognize the body, yet she shivered as a wave of sorrow washed over her. Then she noticed the medics, one of them unusually tall, the other with golden skin.