After the applause, his mind returns from vanishing, and this is the picture hours later:

He is Travis Fleeting in his lonesome, dreaming state, right there in front of you, cuddled up in front of the television in his dingy living room, roommates fast asleep. He does not exist because he is really his glorious friends. He is his listeners. He is love found along the way. He is a strange reminder, constant only for himself in his lonesome dreaming state, his dream now static on the television screen flickering dizzyingly with the word “MUTE” spelled out in green, blocky, digital letters in the lower left corner of the screen.

Travis’s bloodshot eyes are open but not focused as he lay in the fetal position in a beat-up, corrugated, blue armchair. Bands, fields, blurs of colored shapes wash across the television. Now and then a phantom face or object seems to form out of the scrambled noise only to flicker and disappear. Tired but too disturbed by the dream to sleep, Travis stares at some point halfway between himself and the television; a halfway point of consciousness where dreams turn to mist instead of bothering us—their corporeality stolen from them by the undeniable hallmark of the drudgery of reality. There had been a carousel. There were spinning, painted horses—breathing horses— with metal shafts through their middles, their innards. He had seen it. They would bray and kick and scream, their brilliant green and yellow and orange painted skin matched by frantic wide, white eyes and teeth and blood coming from their wounds. Among them: a pale, white horse—almost gray from soot or slush ground into its hair—does nothing but get thumped by the hoofs and torn by the gnashing, burly teeth of the prettier but frightened horses. Chewed and ripped, though born of hope, the white horse stays to comfort the others, to be with them in their dizzy roundandround terror; to free them if he can. Still he hopes that one day he might stumble upon a herd of painted (not purple, orange, green, but painted like Pintos: white, brown, black) horses in Montana, and see them running free through open fields in the cold and low light of dawn.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: 3D, insomnia, static, television, Travis Fleeting