scents, slides, and slugs.

There were many people in this old house, many of them seniors. There was some Avon perfume samples going around and everyone was smelling them. I smelled a sample myself and the smell was so divine that it made me excited and i wanted to jump around and move, and i was smiling, it was a great high, and i found that many others were feeling the same, and a mambo line started. I really felt like marching. The perfume was just such a wonderful scent that i wanted to express my joy by marching. And apparently so did everyone else. Hoards of seniors began marching out the door and into the cold wintry night. sleek ice covered the ground and this oddly struck me as unwise. as much as I wanted to march, and oooohhhh the urge was so strong to keep on marching right out that door, i forced myself to resist for the good of all the seniors.

i could not help them on my own as i could not resist the urge to follow for too long, so i didn't stick around to see which way they marched. instead i ran upstairs to amanda and lucas who lay in bed just lazying about chatting. i urged them to help me to see which way they were going, but they didn't rise and just smiled and stared. i was so angry because they didn't understand the urgency so i accused them of being uncaring heartless ppl. finally, they acted to help me, but not because of my protests, but only because they saw that i was truly concerned. much like parents checking the closet for monsters for a nervous child they agreed to check the back while i checked the front. sure enough i saw the seniors marching off. just as amanda came to join me, she saw them march like tin soldier's around an icy corner.

"Look!" amanda pointed to an elderly flying through the air. he landed perfectly from his projectile trajectory onto a slide formed with ice. as on a luge, he slid quickly out of site to an unknown destination. again, an elderly flying through the air and landing on the slide. this time we saw the source: a small yellow and black catapult behind a snow fort. We ran to the slide careful not to fall sliding away and tried to capture the elderly as they came. we obstructed their course and lay them to the side where they remained in their zombie like state. only after saving three seniors did the person operating the catapult notice.

Slowly, the driver came around the fort. the catapult mechanism had been left behind but the driver remained inside the the central peice, driving it like a mini tank. the top hatch was open and as i climbed up on top of the machine, i looked in to see a living baby doll opperating the machine.

'stop!" amanda shouted, "it's too dangerous".
"It's a baby!" i called back.
"What?" amanda wasn't sure she heard that right but i didn't repeat myself.
"I have to kill it!" I continued.
"You can't kill babies" she protested.

I was determined. It was evil. I stuck my foot in to crush it. In response the living baby doll spun the machine wildly round and round to try and shake me off, but i was still on that buzz, and held on tight. i pushed my foot in to try and crush it as amanda watched in horror.

i wasn't sure if the baby was dead, but the machine had stopped moving. With out any words between us, amanda and i decided that we couldn't risk trying to go down the slide. we would want to walk it, but slippery as it was we would fall and meet the same doom as the elderly b4 us. we collected the three seniors we'd saved and brought them into the house for some soup to warm up.

inside there was a boy, and the remaining residence we gathered around him. he was putting leaves inside a small box which contained a slug. but this was no ordinary slug and really stood out to me as THE object of the dream. it was two inches long, and bright white with grey patches, the way a cow might have. it was rather cartoony and had a cute face and little alien like antennae. "where did you get that from?" i asked.

The boy told a story to us all:

On the south end of the river it is already summer, and every morning i go there to swim. usually i swim along the shore up stream and float back home with the current. There is a rock at one point in the shore which forms a groove. Most of the time i will sit there and take in the scenery for a few moments. This morning when i stopped there, i saw two slugs. One was an ordinary slug, and was the first one i saw. it was on a leaf and was crawling to the edge of it. the further it crawled the more the leaf drooped, until the weight caused the leaf to detach from the stem and it fell into the water and was carried away. The second slug was on the rock, and was this magnificent thing. It was just so beautiful that i wanted to take it home and show everyone. i put my hand out and it crawled onto my hand. at first was worried that it was a leech and would suck my blood, but it didn't and i found it friendly. I kept my hand above water and floated back to the cottage, and put it in this box, but now i'm not sure what leaves to feed it to keep it alive. do you know?

I looked at the slug, and had never seen any thing like it in my life. "no," i said.