Dreams from an opium pipe ...

Dollar to Doughnut~copyrighted material~
Leopold's nightmares were more than hallucinations; they were torture on the most vile level. He saw his tuberculosis-stricken father as a skeletal figure pushing a derelict rag-and-bone junk cart, gasping for breath, reaching and begging for pennies.
No-account Dillon Cafferty stood menacingly tossing lit matches onto his mother’s porch and laughing as if possessed by evil.
Leopold would see his beautiful wife Phryne as a painted whore in makeup so thick it hung like concrete wallpaper, wearing a mascara and lipstick stained camisole, enticing and calling to him from the doorway of Shea’s Hippodrome dance hall and motion picture house.
Eloisa was sitting on the curb outside her family’s home, destitute, disheveled, begging for money and drinking from a pocket flask, her clothing torn to shreds.
Leopold envisioned himself standing atop a grain silo and watching his brother Nicholas trapped inside a swirling whirlpool of wheat, helplessly struggling, and about to be ground into flour.
His mother Wilhelmina, and sisters Johanna, Ottilie and Hilde appeared as charred walking souls, drifting away with their backs turned, their scorched clothing falling from their burned, cadaverous bodies.

He would awake in a night terror, in a cold sweat, wallowing in his personal stench of sweat, tobacco, and the drug. His underclothes were glued to his wet, shivering body. The sweet aftertaste of the opium pipe triggered an involuntary reflex to retch and gag. His violent convulsions became part and parcel of each nightmare.
© 2014 Edward R. Hackemer