Dreams of Japan

As Cobb dreamed sweet, sensual dreams of Geishas in kimonos and eel sushi, a torrential downpour pummeled the dirty streets and buildings of Watershed heights. The rain was incorporated into his dreams as fish falling from the sky, and when the fish turned into people he had glimpsed before in his dreams or perhaps another lifetime, he awoke, with a gray aura fogging up his field of vision. The clock on his bedside table read 7:30; he had been sleeping for only 20 minutes. Cobb attempted to fall back asleep, but a penetrating siren pierced his Japanese fantasies and he reluctantly crawled out of bed. Blanket Cobb was a big sleeper.
But his bonsai trees whispered things to him as he paced back and forth across his apartment, and he found this disquieting, and wanted to go somewhere. "Shizukesa shizukesa," they said, "Bantan sumashu."
"Stop it," Blanket Cobb said. "I'm leaving, so just shut up."
It was still pouring as he walked outside and down the street towards the park. He passed a teen mom and some crows that were clustered around a rotting piece of meat. The teen mom made a weird face as she passed the crows, and Blanket Cobb felt slightly disgusted with the whole scene, and the world in general. He wished he was Japanese or at least not in the prime of his life and living like he did.

Cobb Steps Out

Blanket Cobb stepped out. He stepped out onto the street to get some noodles for dinner, and as he was stepping, his foot landed in a puddle of vomit underneath the Watershed Heights apartment building. "Damn," Blanket Cobb said. The throw-up was pink and reminded him of a coconut-covered snowball dessert treat. "Yum," Blanket Cobb said to himself, reminded of his childhood spent gorging himself on such tasty num-nums. He hurried to the noodle vendor and bought a gigantic box of Pho-Nom-Chum, and then he sat down on a bench and enjoyed his meal. Cobb remembered the large bird that had visited him that morning, and spent some time pondering upon that event before he got up and headed back home.
Blanket had placed an order several weeks earlier for a bonsai collectors magazine, and he was pleased to find that it had arrived in his mailbox sometime that day. The cover featured a beautiful Japanese garden, in which mysterious geisha were hidden behind various small trees and exotic plants. The geisha all wore unreadable expressions behind their freakishly white faces, and Cobb found that he was more than enthralled by this. He imagined finding a geisha in his mailbox instead of the magazine, a geisha he would take up to his apartment and tell all about the joys of bonsai and miniature figurine painting, which was another one of his hobbies. She would be very petite and confide in him her memoirs of a childhood spent in a poor fishing village before she was discovered and turned into a high class prostitute. They would become best friends, and then she would whisk him away to Japan on a dragon and they would live together forever in a Japanese palace with a garden like the one on the cover of "Bonsai World Weekly."
Cobb would have enjoyed expanding on this fantasy, but his feet smelled like barf, so he zoomed upstairs to take off his shoes and relax with his new reading material.